“I took some meetings for it,” you tell her. “For Breezeo. They haven’t announced it yet. I’m not even supposed to talk about it. It’s still too early.”
“Wait, you’re doing it?” She moves, rolling over to look at you. “You?”
“I don’t know. I’m supposed to spend tomorrow going over it with Cliff. But that’s why I didn’t come home right away.”
“That’s… wow. You have to do it! Or you at least have to try. You’d be brilliant as Breezeo.”
“Now you’re pushing it. If I go for the movie, there’s no way I’d ever get the lead. I can't carry a franchise.”
“What? Of course you can! You’d be perfect, Jonathan. I’m serious! I mean, come on, nobody knows Breezeo like I do, and I’m a billion percent sure that it has to be you. So you have to try, okay? For me? Please?”
“You just want to see me wearing the costume, don’t you?”
“Well, I mean, I don’t not want to…”
You laugh, kissing her. “I’ll see if I can make that happen for you.”
“You promise?”
You never promise things. She expects you’ll laugh, but instead, you say, “I promise. I’ll try.”
For the first time in a while, she goes to sleep with a smile… and that’s the last smile she ever gets.
Ugh, that’s too dramatic. It’s also not true. What I really mean is it’s the last time she smiles with you.
Look, I’m doing this wrong again. I can’t keep distancing myself from reality… but then again, what happens after that last smile doesn't feel real.
When I wake up in that bed a few hours later, I’m alone. For a moment, as I lay there, I think I dreamed it, but the smell of your cologne is all over. As I breathe it in, I wonder where you are. It’s not even dawn yet and you’re already gone.
I find out that afternoon. You were spotted in the wee hours of the morning across town, sitting alone in a theater, watching a rehearsal for the stage debut of Serena Markson.
When you finally make it home that night, well after dark, the first thing you do is kiss me. But you taste like whiskey and you smell like a whore, and my chest is caving in on me because of it, so I push you off. Both hands pressed against your chest, I shove you so hard you slam into the wall. You look at me, and I can’t tell if you’re shocked, or hurt, or even confused, because you look numb. Your eyes are a void.
‘You’re overreacting,’ you say when I confront you. ‘It’s nothing.’ But it’s not ‘nothing,’ I know, because that was me once. Don’t you remember? I know what it’s like to be somebody’s lone captive audience. And maybe it would’ve been okay had you told me, had you not come home drunk, covered in perfume, when I worked all goddamn day to ensure you still had a home to come to. In three years, the only thing your dream seems to have paid for is coke.
I’m yelling, and the tears start falling, and you keep whispering, “I’m sorry,” over and over and over, and when I tell you ‘sorry’ doesn't cut it, you say, “I love you, more than anything, baby.”
And I believe you, because you’re good, Jonathan.
Something toxic grew between us. I thought the drugs were your Kryptonite, Superman, but I’m beginning to think it might be me. Am I destroying your dream? Are you free-falling because you’re being weighed down by me? If I weren’t here, would you be soaring?
We scream, and I cry, and you get high, over and over as the weeks carry on, a perpetual cycle fueled by all this stress. The tiniest things start triggering me, and it’s making me sick, so sick that I can’t get out of bed some mornings. And I just want to talk to you, really talk, and not argue. I miss you. I miss us. So I ask about the Breezeo movie, trying to bring us back to common ground, back to where we both still exist, and you say, “It’s not happening now.”
“They’re not making it?”
“Oh, they are,” you say. “I’m just not auditioning.”
Cliff talked you out of trying. I cry when you tell me that, and you lose your temper, telling me to ‘grow up’ because it’s ‘just a shitty comic,’ not realizing I’m upset because you promised, when you never promise, which means I don’t know how much I can trust your words anymore.
I think it was that moment that doomed us. It gets so ugly that we don’t speak for days. You sleep on the couch. The barrier of silence becomes an unclimbable mountain.
All I do is cry… cry… cry…
I’m at work when I realize what’s happening. I confirm it that night, but you’re already passed out on the couch. I’ll let you sleep. I’ll tell you in the morning. You’ll be sober. We’ll be all right. I stay up all night, not sure how to feel. When I hear you stirring in the morning, I hesitate. I’m scared.
I shouldn't ever be afraid to talk to you. What happened to us?
You’re sitting on the couch, putting on your shoes to leave. I stand in the bedroom doorway and ask, “Can we talk for a minute?”
“I have things to do,” you say, no affection in your voice. You sound like your father at that moment, but I’d never say those words to you.
“It’s important. I have something to tell you.”
You stand up, and you’re stone-cold sober, your blue eyes so clear, and I think maybe it’ll be okay, but then you stare me in the eyes and say, “Tell someone who fucking cares.”
And then you walk out.
You walk out on me.
And then I collapse.
My legs won’t hold me.
And you don’t know this, but that woman you don’t care about anymore? The one whose world you just shattered? She’s pregnant. She’s having your baby, Jonathan. And you don’t even know. You don’t even care.
Chapter 27
KENNEDY
It’s raining.
It doesn’t rain a lot here, no more than average, but it always seems to want to rain at the worst moments. It’s as if the sky has a direct line to my emotions. When things get all twisted up inside of me, the world starts cracking and the sky comes apart.
It was storming when I woke up this morning, but now, early evening, barely a trickle falls. The rain has slowed enough for Maddie to splash around in the mud puddles in my father’s front yard, while I sit in a chair on the porch. My father is beside me, steadily rocking.
“You look lost again,” he says. “Like you don’t know whether you’re coming or going.”
I glance his way. “I’m getting a déjà vu vibe here, Dad.”
“You and me both, kiddo,” he says. “Seems like every few months we go through this. He shows up, and then he leaves, and you’re left behind to grieve.”
“It’s different this time.”
“Is it?”
“He’s coming back.”
“Didn’t he always?”
“Yeah, but…”
“But it’s different,” he says. “Yet, it’s not.”
I sigh, exasperated, which only serves to make him laugh.
“He wanted us to go with him."
My father looks surprised. “So why are you sitting here?”
I blink at him. “Are you not the same man who went ballistic last time I left with him?”
“And are you not the same girl who didn’t care what anybody thought, you were going?”
“I was only seventeen. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Which is why I went ballistic.”
I turn away, looking at Maddie. She’s covered in mud and smiling. She doesn’t look lost at all. She looks like she knows exactly where she belongs.
I wish I had her resilience.
I wish Jonathan’s words alone were enough to calm my fears.
He’s been gone for two weeks.
We’re halfway through the month already. Two more weeks and he’s supposed to be done. They’re in Europe now, and the time difference makes it difficult. The calls are sporadic, thirty-second voicemails telling Maddie goodnight or saying ‘I love you’. I wake up to texts, and by the time I answer, he’s too busy to read them.