One True Loves Page 7

  But here is what surprised me: I had the smallest inkling that her life didn’t sound quite so bad.

  She wasn’t always packing or unpacking. She was never jet-lagged. She never had to buy a phone charger she already had because she’d forgotten the original thousands of miles away.

  I had mentioned all of this to Jesse.

  “Do you ever just want to go home?” I said.

  “We are home,” he’d said to me.

  “No, home home. To Acton home.”

  Jesse looked at me suspiciously and said, “You must be an impostor. Because the real Emma would never say that.”

  I laughed and let it go.

  But I wasn’t actually letting it go. Case in point: If Jesse and I were going to have children, were we still going to be hopping on a quick flight to Peru? And maybe more important: Was I ready to raise children in Los Angeles?

  The very moment these questions occurred to me, I started to realize that my life plans had never really extended past my twenties. I had never asked myself if I always wanted to be traveling, if I always wanted to live so far from my parents.

  I began to suspect that this jet-setting Jesse and I had been living had always felt temporary to me, like something I knew I needed to do and then one day would be over.

  I think that I wanted to settle down one day.

  And the only thing that shocked me more than realizing it was realizing I had never realized it before.

  Of course, it did not help matters that I was pretty sure Jesse hadn’t been thinking any of this. I was pretty sure Jesse wasn’t thinking this at all.

  We had created a life of spontaneous adventure. Of seeing all the things people say one day they will see.

  I couldn’t very well change the entire modus operandi of our lives.

  So even though I wanted him to skip Alaska and go to Southern California with me, I told him to go.

  And he was right. I’d already seen a glacier. But he hadn’t.

  So—instead of preparing to celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary—I was driving Jesse to LAX so that he could hop on a flight to Anchorage.

  “We’ll celebrate our anniversary when I get home,” he said. “I’m gonna go all out. Candles, wine, flowers. I’ll even serenade you. And I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  He was meeting the rest of the crew in Anchorage and then getting on a private plane, landing in Akun Island. Most of the time after that, he’d be filming aerial shots from a helicopter.

  “Don’t stress out about it,” I said. “If you can’t call, I totally get it.”

  “Thank you,” he said as he gathered his bags and looked at me. “I love you more than anyone has ever loved anyone in the history of the world. Do you know that? Do you know that Antony didn’t love Cleopatra as much as I love you? Do you know that Romeo didn’t love Juliet as much as I love you?”

  I laughed. “I love you, too,” I said. “More than Liz Taylor loved Richard Burton.”

  Jesse came around the side of the car and stood at my window.

  “Wow,” he said, smiling. “That’s a lot.”

  “All right. Get out of here, would you? I have errands to run.”

  Jesse laughed and kissed me good-bye. And then I watched him walk in front of our car through the automatic doors, into the belly of Los Angeles International Airport.

  Just then, my favorite song came on the radio. I turned up the volume, sang at the top of my lungs, and pulled the car away from the curb.

  As I navigated the streets back home, Jesse texted me.

  I love you. I’ll miss you.

  He must have sent it just before he went through airport security, maybe right after. But I didn’t see it until an hour or so later.

  I texted him back.

  I’ll miss you every second of every day. Xoxo

  I knew that he might not see it for a while, that I might not hear from him for a few days.

  I pictured him riding in a small plane, landing on the island, hopping into a helicopter, and soon seeing a glacier so big it left him breathless.

  I woke up the morning of our anniversary, sick to my stomach. I rushed to the bathroom and vomited.

  I had no idea why. To this day, I don’t know if I ate something bad or if, on some level, I could just sense the looming tragedy in my bones, the way that some dogs can tell a hurricane is coming.

  Jesse didn’t call to wish me a happy anniversary.

  The commercial flight made it to Anchorage.

  The Cessna made it to Akun Island.

  But the first time they took the helicopter out, it never came back.

  The best anyone could conclude was it went down somewhere over the North Pacific.

  The four people on board were lost.

  My husband, my one true love . . .

  Gone.

  Francine and Joe flew into LA and moved into my apartment. My own parents came and rented a hotel a few minutes’ walk away but spent every waking minute with me.

  Francine kept saying that she didn’t understand why this wasn’t a national news story, why there wasn’t a nationwide search party.

  Joe kept telling her that helicopters crash all the time. He said it as if it were good news, as if that meant there was a plan in place for moments like these.

  “They will find him,” he would say to her over and over. “If anyone can swim to safety, it’s our son.”

  I held it together for as long as I could. I held Francine as she sobbed in my arms. I told her, just as Joe did, that it was only a matter of time until we got a call saying he was safe.

  My mom made casseroles and I would cut them up and put them on plates for Francine and Joe and say things like, “We need to eat.” But I never did.

  I cried when no one was around and I found it hard to look in the mirror, but I kept telling everyone that we would find Jesse soon.

  And then they found a propeller of the helicopter on the shore of Adak Island. With Jesse’s backpack. And the body of the pilot.

  The call we had been waiting for came.

  But it went nothing like we expected.

  Jesse had not yet been found.

  He was believed to be dead.

  After I hung up the phone, Francine broke down. Joe was frozen still. My parents stared at me, stunned.

  I said, “That’s crazy. Jesse didn’t die. He wouldn’t do that.”

  Francine developed such strong panic attacks that Joe flew her home and checked her into a hospital.

  My mom and dad stayed on an air mattress at the foot of my bed, watching my every move. I told them I had a handle on it. I thought, for certain, that I did.

  I spent three days walking around in a daze, waiting for the telephone to ring, waiting for someone else to call and say the first call had been wrong.

  That second call never came. Instead, my phone was tied up with people checking in to see if I was OK.

  And then, one day, Marie called and said she’d left Mike in charge of the store. She was flying in to be here for me.

  I was far too numb to decide whether I wanted her around.

  The day Marie arrived, I woke up late in the afternoon to find that my mom had gone to the store and my dad had left to pick Marie up from the airport. My first time alone in what felt like forever.

  It was a clear day. I decided I didn’t want to be in my house anymore. But I didn’t want to leave it, either. I got dressed and asked the neighbors if I could borrow their ladder so that I could clean the gutters.

  I had no intention of cleaning anything. I just wanted to stand, high up on the earth, unencumbered by the safety of walls, floors, and ceilings. I wanted to stand high enough that if I fell, it’d kill me. This is not the same thing as wanting to die.

  I climbed up to the roof and stood there, with glassy bloodshot eyes. I stared straight ahead, looking at treetops and into the windows of high-rises. It didn’t make me feel any better than being in the house. But it didn’t make me feel any worse, either. So I
stayed there. Just standing and looking. Looking at anything that didn’t make me want to crawl into a ball and fade away.

  And then I saw, in the sliver of a view between two buildings, so far in the distance you almost couldn’t make it out . . .

  The ocean.

  I thought, Maybe Jesse is out there in the water. Maybe he’s swimming. Maybe he’s building a raft to get home.

  The hope that I clung to in that moment didn’t feel good or freeing. It felt cruel. As if the world were giving me just enough rope to hang myself.

  I got down off the roof and searched through Jesse’s things. I ransacked his closet, dresser, and desk before I found them.

  Binoculars.

  I got back up on the roof and I stood right where I could see the sliver of sea. I waited.

  I was not enjoying the view. I was not relishing the peace and quiet. I was not reveling in my solitude.

  I was looking for Jesse.

  I saw waves cresting onto the shore. I saw a boat. I saw people under umbrellas, lying on towels, as if there wasn’t important work to be done.

  I heard my dad and sister enter the house and start looking around for me. I heard, “Emma?” coming from them in every room of the house. I recognized the worry as it grew in their voices, as each time they said my name they were met with more silence. Soon, my mom came home and her voice joined the chorus.

  But I couldn’t respond. I had to stand there and watch for Jesse. It was my duty, as his wife. I had to be the first to spot him when he made landfall.

  When I noticed someone coming up to the roof, I assumed it was my dad and I thought, Good, he can look, too.

  But it was Marie.

  She stood there, looking at me, as I held the binoculars up to my face and stared at the ocean.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “What are you doing?” she said as she started walking toward me.

  “I’m going to find him.”

  I felt Marie put her arm around my shoulder. “You can’t . . . that won’t . . . work,” she said.

  “I have to be looking for him. I can’t give up on him.”

  “Em, give me the binoculars.”

  I wanted to ignore her, but I needed to explain my logic. “Jesse could come back. We have to be watching.”

  “He isn’t coming back.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “You just can’t stand that I’m no longer in your shadow,” I said to her. “Because it means you aren’t the center of the world anymore. Jesse is coming back, Marie. And I am going to sit here and wait until he does. Because I know my husband. I know how incredible he is. And I’m not going to allow you to make me feel like he’s anything less just because you like it better when I feel small.”

  Marie reared her head back, as though I’d struck her.

  “I have to stay here and watch for him. It’s my job. As his wife.”

  When I saw the look on my sister’s face in that moment, a mixture of compassion and fear, I realized that she thought I was crazy.

  For a moment, I wondered, Oh, my God. Am I crazy?

  “Emma, I’m so sorry,” she said as she put her arms around me and held me the way a mother holds a child, as if we were of the same body. I was not used to that type of sister, the type of sister that is also a friend. I was used to having just a sister, the way some of your teachers are just teachers and some of your coworkers are just coworkers. “Jesse is dead,” she told me. “He’s not out there somewhere trying to come home. He’s gone. Forever. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  For a moment, I wondered, What if she’s right?

  “He’s not dead,” I said, my voice wavering and rocky. “He’s out there.”

  “He’s not out there,” she said. “He’s dead.”

  For a moment, I wondered, Is that possible?

  And then the truth washed over me like a flood.

  I sobbed so hard for so long that every day I would wake up with my eyes swollen shut. I didn’t get dressed for three weeks.

  I cried for him, and for what I’d lost, and for every day left of my life that I had left to live without him.

  My mom had to force me to bathe. She stood in the shower with me, holding my naked body up to the water, carrying my entire weight in her arms because I wouldn’t stand up on my own.

  The world seemed so dark and bleak and meaningless. Life seemed so pointless, so cruel.

  I thought of how Jesse took care of me and how he held me. I thought of how he felt when he ran his hands down my back, how his breath smelled sweet and human.

  I lost hope and love and all of my kindness.

  I told my mom that I wanted to die.

  I said it even though I knew it would hurt her to hear it. I had to say it because of how much it hurt to feel it.

  She winced and closed her eyes and then she said, “I know. But you can’t. You have to live. You have to find a way to live.”

  Six weeks after I left Jesse at the airport, I came out of my bedroom, walked into the kitchen where my parents were talking, and I said, with a calmness and clarity of purpose that I had been lacking for weeks, “I want to go back to Acton. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

  My father nodded and my mom said, “Whatever you need.”

  I do not remember who packed up my things, who sold my car and my furniture. I do not remember getting on the plane. All I know is that, a week later, I landed at Logan Airport.

  Home.

  Emma and Sam

  Or, how to put yourself back together

  When you lose someone you love, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever feel better. That, one day, you’ll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order.

  But it does happen.

  If you’re patient and you work at it.

  It starts just by breathing in the Massachusetts air again. Your soul recharges ever so slightly when you see brick walkways and brownstones in Boston, when you pull into your parents’ driveway and move back into your old bedroom.

  Your emotional fortitude grows stronger as you sleep in your childhood bed and eat your mother’s pancakes for breakfast and hide from most of the world.

  You spend all of your time watching the Travel Channel and you get so bored of it that you pick up a novel from the stack of books in your bedroom, the books that your parents have given you over the years that you refused to crack open until now.

  You read all the way through to the end of one, only to find out that the husband dies. You hurl the book across the room, breaking the bedside lamp. When your mom comes home that night, you tell her what happened. You ask her for books to read where no one dies.

  Two days later, you find both of your parents in the living room with a pile of novels on the coffee table. They are skimming through them one by one, making sure every character lives to the end. That night, you have a new stack of books to read and you open up the first one, confident it won’t break you down.

  It is the first time in a long time that you have felt safe.

  Marie finds out that she is having identical twin girls. You want to buy her a pair of matching onesies but you don’t want to leave the house. You order them online to have them sent to her. When the site asks you for a gift message, you know that you should congratulate her and use a lot of exclamation points but you don’t have it in you. You can’t summon up enthusiasm, can’t even bring yourself to type it. Instead, you type, “For my little baby nieces.”

  Your mom comes home with a new bedside lamp for you, made just for reading. It shoots up from the base and then hangs over your head, hovering just above the pages. You read three books from the stack that week, by the light through the window during the day and the lamplight hovering above you at night.

  Your nieces are born. They are named Sophie and Ava. You hold them. They are beautiful. You won
der how it’s possible Marie got everything she ever wanted and you . . . ended up here. You know this is called self-pity. You don’t care.

  Olive flies in from Chicago to see you. Everyone assumes she will stay at her parents’ place but you feel immense relief when she says she’d rather make up a bed on the floor of your room. She doesn’t ask how you are because she knows there’s no answer. Instead, she tells you that she’s thinking of giving up caffeine and makes you help her Facebook-stalk the man she just began seeing. You feel less alone when she’s there, which is a welcome reprieve from the crushing loneliness you feel almost all the time. When she packs up to go back to Chicago, you joke about going with her, fitting in the overhead compartment. Olive says, “You probably can’t see it just yet, but this place is good for you.”

  One day, the memories that haunt every section of your town and your house, the memories of where you and Jesse met and fell in love as teenagers, feel contained and manageable. So you venture outside.

  You head to your family’s bookstore.

  You realize you aren’t ready for a full day out of the house when you break down next to the Shel Silverstein collection Marie put up in the back corner.

  You don’t even know why you’re breaking down. Nothing about Shel Silverstein reminds you of Jesse. Except that Shel Silverstein wrote about what it meant to be alive and you feel like you aren’t alive anymore. Because Jesse isn’t. You feel like you stopped living when he went missing. You feel like the rest of your days are killing time until it’s time to die.

  You know the only thing you can do is get in the passenger’s seat of your dad’s car and allow him to drive you back home and put you to bed.

  But then you feel yourself growing stronger in that bed, as if you’re squeezing the tears out of yourself, wringing yourself dry of pain. You imagine yourself bleeding grief, as if the water from your eyes is the pain itself. You imagine it leaving your body and being soaked up by the mattress.

  You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty, so empty that if someone knocked on you, you’d sound hollow.