Someone Else's Love Story (38 page)

“Do you want to come inside?” Bridget asked me, touching my leg with one hand. A gardener’s hand, also calloused, with short, neat nails.

I realized I was crying.

“You’re so stupid. You’re so stupid,” I said, though it was hard to push words through my cloggy throat, and my nose was snotting up. I’d been stupid, too, with all my different kinds of patty-pans. Pretend wife, pretend hot mistress. Running first after him and then away, like I was being Pepé Le Pew and then the stupid cat with its accidental stripe in turn. Even this, following him like some romantically imprinted duckling to declare my love. It was all little-girl tricks. Little-girl games. I should have known better. I lost my little-girl card when I got Natty.

This was another pretend, and here in a yard on a bench was his real wife, with sad, kind, tired eyes. The lesson of Mimmy and my dad was not for me. It was for her. It was for them. I was so sick with understanding that I was practically yelling at her.

“Why didn’t you just stay dead, if you are going to be so stupid? Why did you even live? So you could sit in your yard and talk about some dumb afterlife experience with messed-up, mourning strangers? You love him. You think I don’t know what that looks like? I don’t care if he sent you away at the hospital. He was shot. He couldn’t
make
you leave. Now, for all you know, I’ll go right straight to him to beg him to love me and forget you. And still you sit here, being stupid.”

The compassion on her face as I raged on made me simply want to kill her. I wrenched myself up and away and stomped back to my car. She called my name, but I ignored her and got in, slamming my door. I drove myself in circles, crying and crying.

Screw her, if she didn’t want him. I headed for William’s house to wait for him, turning toward Morningside even as I was saying every bad word that I knew. I wasn’t halfway there before I turned the car around. I drove away from him, and even got onto 85 to head up north to Mimmy’s, because what was I in love with, really? William?

He was beautiful and closed so shut that I could dress him up in any kind of superhero suit I wanted. Captain Animal, rising and smiting Stevie down. Dr. Genius, finding all my answers inside the microscopic mystery of cells.

He
had
actually done these things, though. He was actually brave and good. I got off after a single exit, driving back toward Morningside, but I was wondering. In the Circle K, did I really fall in love with him? Or was it just the idea of him, something big and strong and smart enough to get in between me and every bad thing in the world? A silent, strong protector. He’d let me hit at evil with my tiny fist in the safety of knowing it was not allowed to hit me back. He’d been a white knight wise enough to kill even my son’s nightmares, taping up all the holes where the bad, bad things came in.

What frightened child wouldn’t want that? Maybe my body felt free with him only because I felt safe with him. Maybe loving him was nothing more than wanting to be safe. If so, then it was crap. No one could make the world safe. No one on this blue ball was ever safe for even a second. I knew that. I knew that better than most girls my age.

He was so beautiful. He wasn’t mine. I should run to the mountains now, and hide. I should run right into his arms and demand that he close them around me. I should run home to my mother and cry into her lap.

I stopped dead on Ponce de Leon Avenue, not turning toward Morningside and facing the wrong way to get back on the highway. Behind me four or five enraged people began squashing on their horns. I hit my flashers and sat there with other cars streaming around me, honking for me to go, go, go, but I couldn’t go until I knew which way to turn.

I didn’t want to choose. Both options sucked, and I was tired of every kind of running that there was. So in the end, I didn’t go to either place.

In the end, I drove myself to Piedmont Park.

Chapter 14

H
e drove directly to Paula’s office after he left the Sullivans’ house in Decatur, unable to stomach the idea of returning to his house alone. Paula took him to shoot pool, and for hours he thought of very little beyond the angles and the English. They went back to her loft around midnight, where he slept on her sofa for a couple of hours.

Now, dawn is close, and Paula is still hacking at the last wooden bench with her hatchet. They have Holy Shit Park to themselves in this dead hour before early morning. He’s dragged the benches to the center of the green space, hoping the sound of breaking them down to kindling won’t call anyone. It’s the last thing.

The sidewalk is littered with shards of glass. Paula, who long ago wanted to put rocks through all the streetlights, has had her chance now. They’ve ripped the late summer flowers out in handfuls and strewn them across the grass with their roots torn and exposed. After that, William used the ax to smash most of the birdhouses, scattering this season’s used-up nests, dry and empty here in late July. He hacked down all of the four Japanese maples he himself put in years ago, as a wedding present.

“You have to do this bench, Bubba. It’s defeating me,” Paula says. She is panting, but her eyes are bright and she is grinning. He isn’t sure if it is because he took the note to Bridget, or if she is simply happy to be breaking things. Probably both. “Hatchets are stupid. Why do you get the ax?”

She backs out of the way, and William swings, bringing the ax down in a long, fast arc that feels good, a good stretching release of force from the muscles of his back and shoulders, though his abdomen protests. The splintered bench snaps, all the slats caving down at once, and the blade bites deep into the dirt.

“Oh. That’s why,” Paula says as he wrestles the ax back out.

They stand with their heads tilted to equal angles, listening for the sounds of feet or yelling or sirens, in case the smashing of the bench has notified a neighborly insomniac that crime is happening.

Nothing.

Paula cocks the hatchet to a jaunty angle on her shoulder and heads toward the final birdhouse. It is covered in hand-painted flowers that look like they’ve been done by a child or an adult with little aptitude for art. It is hung too low on a trunk to be a good birdhouse. Any cat who happens by could easily get to it. Anyone over six feet tall can peer inside it.

William says, “Not that one,” and she leaves it be.

The rest of the small park is a jagged wreck of torn-up, dying plants, shards of glass, and wooden benches hacked into kindling. They sit down on the ground, side by side, as they have destroyed all the other places to sit. Paula’s shoulder presses companionably into his.

“This is actually what I’m good at. Isn’t that sad?” She doesn’t sound sad. “I’m completely great at tearing shit right the hell up. Taking things apart is all I do. It’s even my job.”

“You do other things,” William says.

“Yeah, but I don’t build. I think you and Bridget, as a couple, are the only thing I’ve worked to build in my whole life.”

William nods. This sounds accurate. “Do you think she’ll come?”

The note he left taped to the Sullivans’ house in Decatur said,
Meet me at your old tulip bed tomorrow, just before sunrise
. This note didn’t promise something good would happen, as the first one had. He isn’t sure Bridget will think this is good, what he’s doing.

It’s one thing to decide what you want. It’s quite another to know how to get it. William doesn’t know how, but he is trying.

“I hope so, Bubba, because you’ve certainly put some effort in.” She waves her hand at the chaos around them.

Paula could have come up with a better plan, more romantic, perhaps, and put it together for him very quickly. She tried while they were playing pool, and he told her to get her head in the game before he ran the table. He didn’t want Paula’s ideas. He decided this all on his own before he went to get her. No chemistry or tricks. No catalyst, no puzzle. He wrote the note in plain blue ink. Then he worried that Bridget wouldn’t understand, so at the bottom, he wrote,
This is a love note
. He wanted to be clear. He wanted full disclosure, so she could decide to come, or not.

If she comes, he has things to show her. The park, restored to its original shit, is only one.

At home, on the mantel, is the second thing. He took down three pictures of Twyla that were still in the attic. There could never be enough pictures to capture all the ways that Twyla was, so he chose them by year. Twyla the newborn. Twyla at one. Twyla at two.

Bridget wanted pictures out because, for her, some celestial Twyla still existed. For William, Twyla stopped when the backseat stopped. It made physical objects that were closely associated with her very hard to look at. He put them all up in the attic, quite soon after the accident, one Saturday while Bridget worked at the shelter. He thought it would be easier, but Bridget hadn’t responded well.

Now, William wants them back out, too. They are a testament that Twyla
was
, and that her short existence mattered. It was wrong to put all trace of her away. There was no justice in it.

His reasons are different from Bridget’s, but the result is the same. This was always true, in the before, inside their marriage. They would often follow separate chains of reasoning, and yet come to the same conclusion. Bridget acknowledged this herself, though she spoke of it in terms of paths and destinations.

The last thing is a note in his calendar. He has set up a meeting with Father Lewis. Father Lewis will probably need to talk for a long time, but William believes he can find a way to navigate the conversation peaceably. Before the Circle K, he could not allow Father Lewis, or anyone, even his wife, to say his child was in “a better place” without speaking back in the cruelest terms.

“It’s such shit, and you know it,” he said to Father Lewis, then, while Bridget sat silent on their sofa. She stared out the window, watching birds light and peck and flutter on the feeders. She didn’t appear to be listening as William told him, “If you had faith, you’d walk into the sea and get to heaven sooner.”

“Suicide is a sin, William. Are you thinking of harming yourself?” the priest asked, concerned.

William didn’t answer the direct question, which in retrospect is telling. All he said was, “You’re worshipping a God who sticks you to the planet on a technicality.”

These conversations were not productive.

Now he has decided to return to a sustainable peace with Bridget’s church. If he doesn’t, he is choosing to remain on his side of the unwinnable either/or. When it is God or William, God has her, all to himself.

God has had her from the moment the paramedics lifted Bridget out of her wrecked wagon, and she saw the place where the backseat had been. She experienced a cardiac arrest, the stop that is the start of death. Bridget, inside the process of her body shutting down, dreamed she saw their child rising, whole and beautiful, and she went after her. She talked about her own brief death this way, as if it had been a choice, saying she shrugged off her body like a heavy coat and flew up to catch Twyla.

What happened after that—the beckoning light, the flight through the tunnel holding Twyla, the flooding sense of peace, the bells, the careful placing of their laughing child into huge, strong arms that held her kindly, the feeling of being welcome, of a warm acceptance—was a direct result of cerebral anoxia and the flood of endorphins that the panicked brain releases as it dies. William could likely have approximated the experience for himself, with a careful use of ketamine and suggestion.

In retrospect, however, this was not a thing he should have said to Bridget.

To be fair, there was little he could say to Bridget on the subject of Twyla’s afterlife, so Bridget listened, more and more, to God.

She began going to mass every morning. When not at mass, she spent hours praying, talking to the God she imagined holding their child. At night, Bridget even started sleeping on her back, facing up, yearning toward a better comfort than any William had to offer. Perhaps because it was a comfort that William’s words directly undermined.

He stopped talking when he understood how deeply it hurt her, but by then even his silence was a contradiction of her hope. William’s very presence corroded it. His unbelief, his unremitting sorrow, the absoluteness of his loss—it was an assault upon her only peace. She moved farther and farther from him. She avoided him in daylight, busying herself with mass and prayer and more work for the church. The slice of sheet widened in the bed between them every night. It was Bridget and God, and there was no room for William.

As the months ticked on, her words and eyes for God and God alone, William became so angry. His longtime rival was no longer satisfied with first place. God had taken all the places. William became angry with all parts of Bridget, one by one, until he was even angry at the details of her dying hallucination.

If William’s heart stopped beating, he thought, were he to dream an afterlife as his brain’s electrical activity ticked down to cooling nothing, were he to find himself in Bridget’s heaven, he would not hand Twyla over. He would fight and rage. He would rend the puffy cloud walls and kick holes in the golden streets. He would go to his oblivion in the peace of knowing he had demanded Twyla’s life back with the last pulse of his brain. Irrational, this anger, but it came. The more she prayed, the more it grew.