One True Loves Read online

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he says to me.

  “Emma,” Francine says, putting a scarf around her neck. “It’s like a breath of fresh air to see you.”

  “Thanks,” I say back to her. “You, too.” I don’t know what to call her. When I was a teenager, I called her “Mrs. Lerner.” When I was married to her son, I called her “Franny.”

  “Look at your hair!” she says, moving her hand toward my short hair but not actually touching it. “It’s so different.”

  I am stronger than when I knew them. I stand straighter. I am more patient. I hold fewer grudges. I am more thankful for what I have, less resentful for what I don’t. I am less restless. I read a lot more books. I play the piano. I’m engaged.

  But, of course, she can’t see all that.

  The only change she can see is my short, blond hair.

  “It’s very gamine.”

  “Thanks,” I say back as if I am confident this is a compliment but, by the way Francine says it, I’m not.

  “How are you?” she says.

  “Um,” I say. “Good. You?”

  “Us, too,” she says. “Us, too. The Lord works in mysterious ways but I am stunned, humbled really, at what a gift today is.”

  Jesse wasn’t raised with any religious instruction and in high school I once heard Francine say she didn’t “care what you think God wants” to a proselytizing Mormon who rang their doorbell. Now I’m wondering if that’s changed. If losing Jesse made her a born-again Christian and if getting him back serves as all the proof she needs that she’s on the right track.

  Joe looks at me briefly and then looks away. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. But he appears to be much more conflicted about everything. Francine seems to think that life is going to be perfect again, just as soon as Jesse gets off that plane. But I think Joe understands that everything is going to be a lot more complex.

  “All right,” Francine says. “Shall we head in there? I can’t believe he lands soon. Look at this, the three of us on our way to see our boy.”

  She pulls out her phone and checks it.

  “Looks like Chris, Tricia, and the boys will be here with Danny and Marlene in a minute.”

  I knew Chris and Tricia had kids not because anyone told me but because I saw Tricia in T.J. Maxx last year, many months pregnant with a toddler at her side.

  I don’t actually know who Marlene is. I can only assume she’s Danny’s girlfriend, fiancée, or wife.

  The simple fact is that I know almost nothing about the Lerners anymore and they know almost nothing about me. I don’t even know if they know about Sam.

  Joe and I follow Francine as she walks confidently in the direction of the terminal.

  “It is hard to predict how he’ll be feeling,” Francine says as we walk. “From what I’ve heard and the advice that I’ve been given by professionals, our job right now is to make him feel safe.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  Right before we get to the door, Francine turns and looks at me. “In that vein, we have chosen not to tell him you’ve moved on.”

  So they do know. Of course they do.

  “OK,” I say, unsure how else to respond other than to acknowledge that I’ve heard her.

  The wind picks up and I find myself wishing I had brought a warmer coat. The air here is sharper than I expected. I button up tighter and I watch as Joe does the same.

  “You can tell him if you want,” Francine says. “I just don’t know if he can handle finding out you are already engaged to someone else.”

  It is the “already” that bothers me. The “already” nested firmly in the sentence, as if it’s right at home between “you are” and “engaged.”

  I resolve to stay quiet. I tell myself the best response is stoicism. But then, before I realize I’ve done it, I’ve let the feelings in my chest become words out of my mouth.

  “You don’t need to make me feel guilty,” I tell her. “I feel plenty guilty all on my own.”

  Even though I know she hears me, she pretends she’s heard nothing. It doesn’t matter; even if she did acknowledge it, I know there’s no way she could possibly understand what I mean.

  I feel awful for giving up on Jesse. For thinking he was dead. For moving on. For falling in love with someone else. I’m actually furious at myself for that.

  But I’m also really angry at myself for not being loyal to Sam, for not remaining steadfast and true in my devotion, like I have promised him I would be. I am mad at myself for being unsure, for not being the sort of woman who can tell him he’s the only one, for not giving him the kind of love he deserves.

  I’m mad at myself for a lot of things.

  So much so that I barely have time to consider what anyone else thinks of me.

  “OK,” Joe says abruptly. “Let’s go. Jesse’s going to land any minute.”

  I watch through the plate-glass window in front of me as a plane flies low in the sky and lands on the runway.

  My heart starts beating so hard in my chest that I am afraid I am having a heart attack.

  A man on the ground wheels out a staircase. A door opens. A pilot walks out.

  And then there is Jesse.

  Worse for wear and yet, somehow, never more beautiful to me than right now.

  Pictures never did his smile justice. I remember that now.

  He’s also thin and frail, as if his body is made only of muscle and bone. His once-gentle face is sleek, hard edges where soft cheeks used to be. His hair is longer, shaggier. His skin is mottled light brown and pink, looking very much like a three-year sunburn.

  But his mannerisms are the same. His smile is the same. His eyes, the same.

  I stare at him as he gets off the plane. I stare at him as he hugs Francine and Joe. I stare at him as he comes closer to me, as he looks me in the eye with purpose. I notice that the pinkie on his right hand stops at the first knuckle. He lost a finger somewhere along the way.

  “Hi,” he says.

  Just hearing that one word makes me feel as though I have gone back in time, to a part of my life when things made sense, when the world was fair.

  “Hi.”

  “You are a sight for sore eyes.”

  I smile. I bury my face in my hands. He grabs me, holding me. I can feel my pulse beat erratically, as if it isn’t sure whether to speed up or slow down.

  I wonder if this is all real.

  But when I open my eyes again, he’s still there. He’s right here in front of me, surrounding me.

  I grieved him as if he were dead. But here he is.

  It’s almost terrifying, how much it defies logic and reason. What else do we know about the world that isn’t true?

  “You’re home,” I say.

  “I’m here.”

  You know how every once in a while you look back on your life and you wonder how so much time has passed? You wonder how each moment bled into the next and created the days, months, and years that now all feel like seconds?

  That’s how I feel.

  Right now.

  In this moment.

  It feels like our entire past together spans eons and the time I’ve spent without him is an insignificant little flash.

  I have loved Jesse since the day I saw him at that swim meet.

  And I’m having a hard time remembering how I lived without him, how I could bear to look at a world that I thought he wasn’t in, and why I thought I could ever love anyone the way I love him.

  Because it has been him.

  My whole life.

  It has always, always been him.

  How have I spent all of my time forgetting who I am and who I love?

  The last couple of hours have been a daze. I’ve stood by, saying barely anything, as the whole family embraced Jesse’s return home. I watched as Francine cried her eyes out and prayed to God at the sight of him, as Chris and Tricia introduced him to their son, Trevor, and their baby girl, Ginnie. As Danny introduced him to his new wife, Marlene.

&nbs
p; My phone has rung a number of times but I have yet to bring myself to even look at the caller ID. I can’t handle real life right now. I can barely handle what’s happening right in front of me.

  And I can’t even begin to reconcile what is happening right in front of me to my real life.

  There is so much for Jesse to process. You can tell there is a great deal that his family wants to say, so much they want to do. I find myself wanting to tell him every thought I’ve had while he’s been gone, wanting to describe every moment I’ve spent without him, every feeling I have right now. I want to plug my heart into his and upload the past three and a half years right into his soul.

  I can only imagine that everyone else here wants to do that same thing.

  It must be so overwhelming to be him, to be the person everyone is staring at, the person everyone wants to see with their very own eyes and hold in their own hands.

  As I watch Jesse interact with his family, I feel suddenly like I don’t belong here.

  Jesse is holding his niece, Ginnie, for the first time, trying to remain calm. But I know him. I know what the downturn of the corners of his eyes means. I know why he pulls his ears back, why his neck looks rigid and stiff.

  He’s uncomfortable. He’s confused. This is all so much for him. Too much.

  I catch his eye. He smiles.

  And I realize it’s everyone else who doesn’t belong here. There may be twenty people in this room but there are only two people in the whole world to Jesse and me and they are Jesse and me.

  When his family has calmed down, they all start discussing how they will make their way back to Francine and Joe’s house. I watch Jesse pull apart from the pack and then I feel his arm on me, pulling me aside.

  “Is your car here?” he says.

  “Yeah. Just right outside.”

  I can’t believe I’m talking to him. He’s right in front of me. Talking to me. Jesse Lerner. My Jesse Lerner. Is alive and talking to me. Nothing has ever been so impossible and yet happening.

  “All right, great. Let’s get out of here soon, then.”

  “OK,” I say, stone-faced.

  “Are you OK?” he asks me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” The moment he hears it come out of his mouth, he closes his eyes. When he opens them back up, he says, “I’m sorry. You are seeing a ghost. Aren’t you?”

  I look at him and I am hit with a wave of exhaustion.

  Do you know how tiring it is to see a dead man in front of you? To have to remind your brain every half second that your eyes aren’t lying?

  I’m overwhelmed by the stunning incredibility of the truth. That I can, right this very second, reach out and touch him. That I can ask him any of the questions I’ve spent years of my life wishing I’d asked him. That I can tell him I love him.

  The desire to tell him, and the belief that he would never hear me, has gutted me year after year after year.

  And now I can tell him. I can just open my mouth and say it and he will hear it and he will know.

  “I love you,” I say. I say it because I mean it right now, but I also say it for every single time I couldn’t say it then.

  He looks at me and he smiles a deep and peaceful smile. “I love you, too.”

  It all hurts so bad and feels so good that I’d swear my heart is bleeding.

  There is such immense relief of an ache so deep that I fall to pieces, as if I hadn’t realized until now how much effort it was taking to seem normal, to stand up straight.

  My legs can’t hold me. My lungs can’t sustain me. My eyes stare ahead but don’t see a thing.

  Jesse catches me before I fall to the ground. Everyone is looking but I barely care.

  Jesse supports my weight and leads me around the corner, into the bathroom. When the door shuts, he puts his arms around me, tightly, holding me so close that there’s no air between us. For years there were immeasurable miles separating us and now, not even oxygen.

  “I know,” he says, “I know.”

  He is the only person who can understand my pain, my astonishment, my joy.

  “I’m going to tell my family we need some time, OK?”

  I nod vehemently into his chest. He kisses the top of my head. “I’ll be right back. Stay here.”

  I stand against the bathroom wall and watch him walk out the door.

  I look at myself in the mirror. My eyes are glassy and bloodshot. The skin around them is blotched red. The diamond ring on my finger catches the dingy yellow light.

  I could have taken it off before I came here. I could have slipped it off my finger and left it in my car. But I didn’t. I didn’t because I didn’t want to lie.

  But right now, I cannot for the life of me understand why I thought wearing it was better than tossing it in my jewelry box and replacing it with my little ruby ring.

  Both of them are only half the truth.

  I close my eyes. And I remember the man I woke up next to this morning.

  Jesse is back.

  “OK,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  He grabs my hand and leads me out through a back door. He walks toward the parking lot. His family is still inside. The wind blows through our hair as we run toward the bank of cars.

  “Which one is yours?” he asks. I point to my sedan at the corner of the lot. We get into the car. I turn on the ignition, put the car in reverse, and then I put the car right back into neutral.

  “I need a minute,” I say.

  Sometimes I think this is a dream that I’m going to wake up from and I don’t know whether that would be good or bad.

  “I get it,” Jesse says. “Take all the time you need.”

  I look at him, trying to fully process what is happening. I find myself staring at the space where the rest of his pinkie used to be.

  It will take us days, maybe weeks, months, or years, to truly understand what each other has gone through, to understand who we are to each other now.

  Somehow that makes me feel calmer. There’s no rush for us to make sense of all of this. It will take as long as it takes.

  “All right,” I say. “I’m good.”

  I pull out of the spot and toward the road. When I get to the main drive, I take a right.

  “Where are we going?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him.

  “I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you forever.”

  I look at him, briefly taking my eyes off the road.

  I don’t know where I’m driving; I just drive. And then I turn on the heat and I feel it blaze out of the vents and onto my hands and feet. I can feel the smothering warmth on my cheeks.

  We hit a red light and I come to a stop.

  I look over at him and he’s looking out the window, deep in thought. No doubt this is even more bewildering for him than it is for me. He must have his own set of questions, his own conflicted feelings. Maybe he loved someone out there in the world while he was gone. Maybe he did unspeakable things to survive, to get back here. Maybe he stopped loving me somewhere along the way, gave up on me.

  I have always thought of Jesse as my other half, as a person that I know as well as I know myself, but the truth is he’s a stranger to me now.

  Where has he been and what has he seen?

  The light turns green and the sky is getting darker by the minute. The weather forecast said it might hail tonight.

  Tonight.

  I’m supposed to go home to Sam tonight.

  When the winding back roads we are traveling get windier, I realize I’m not headed anywhere in particular. I pull over onto a well-worn patch on the side of the road. I put the car in neutral and pull up the hand brake, but I keep the heat on. I unbuckle my seat belt and I turn to look at him.

  “Tell me everything,” I say. He’s hard for me to look at, even though he’s all I want to see.

  Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, has weathered him. His skin has a leatheriness that it didn’t have when he left. His face has wrinkled in the overuse
d spots. I wonder if the lines around his eyes are from squinting off in the distance, looking for someone to save him. I wonder if his pinkie isn’t the only wound, if there are more beneath his clothes. I know there must be a great deal beneath the surface.

  “What do you want to know?” he asks me.

  “Where were you? What happened?”

  Jesse blows air out of his mouth, a telltale sign that these are all questions he doesn’t really want to answer.

  “How about just the short version?” I say.

  “How about we talk about something else? Absolutely anything else?”

  “Please?” I say to him. “I need to know.”

  Jesse looks out the window and then back to me. “I’ll tell you now, and then will you promise that you won’t ask about it again? Nothing more?”

  I smile and offer him a handshake. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

  Jesse takes my hand, holds it. He feels warm to the touch. I have to stop myself from touching more of him. And then Jesse opens his mouth and says, “Here it goes.”

  When the helicopter went down, he knew he was the only survivor. He declines to tell me how he knew that; he doesn’t want to talk about the crash. All he’ll say is that there was an inflatable raft with emergency supplies, including drinking water and rations, that saved his life and got him through the weeks it took to find land.

  Land is a generous description for where he ended up. It was a rock formation in the middle of the sea. Five hundred paces from one end to the other. It was not really even an islet, let alone an island, but it had a gradual enough slope on one side to give it a small shore. Jesse knew he’d traveled far from Alaska because the water was mild and the sun was relentless. Initially, he planned to stay there only long enough to rest, to feel earth under his feet. But soon, he realized that the raft had been punctured along the rocks. It was almost entirely deflated. He was stuck.

  He was almost out of water and running low on food bars. He used the old water containers to collect rainwater. He searched the rocks for any signs of plants or animals but found only sand and stone. So he figured out how to fish.