Happily Ever After

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

When I get back to my apartment, I stand in front of the mirror analyzing how traumatized I look versus how traumatized I feel. I decide my physical appearance is an accurate reflection of my internal distress.

I don’t have time for another shower. Sam is almost here. I throw my hair up and attempt to redo my eyeliner, which comes out tragically uneven.

I walk into the kitchen and drink a glass of cold water.

“No, this is good,” I say to myself. “This is really good. Sophie is obviously an unstable person. I don’t need her in my life. Who needs a domineering friend who lives in a scary house with ghosts and hangs out with spiders and curses people? Plus, she’s over four hundred years old. I need friends my own age.”

When I first moved here, I tried not to get into the habit of talking to myself out loud, but it’s actually doing a great job of calming me down. I was dangling over the edge, and the sound of my own voice is the thrown rope.

“You’re okay,” I say. “You’re okay. Sam is going to be here any minute. You’re about to see Sam. Everything is going to work out.”

I go on babbling to myself until Sam calls to tell me that he’s outside.

I take another sip of water and shake out my arms and legs, which are sore from all of the running I did earlier, which I’m officially not going to think about anymore. In the past.

When I get to the bottom of the steps, I pause before I open the door.

I wonder if he’ll kiss me.

I open the door.

There he is.

“I’m selling encyclopedias,” he says.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got J, W and, I think, U? I’ll have to check on that.”

“Please. I’m most interested in you.”

“See what I did there?” he asks, grinning. He has a dimple. I forgot about the dimple.

How could I forget about the dimple? I want to stick my finger in it. Have I ever done that before? How could I not?

Was it always there? Is it new?

He looks different. I don’t know if he’s changed or if he was altered in my memory.

“Did you spend the whole drive coming up with the setup for that line?” I ask.

“Just the last hour,” he says.

“Come in,” I tell him, moving aside so he can step into the stairway. He begins to climb, and I follow behind him, examining his butt on the way up.

It’s a good butt. The butt I remember.

“It’s nice up here,” he says. “Quaint.”

“You mean upstate?”

He opens the door to my apartment and steps inside. It’s strange to see him in this space. Two lives colliding. He looks around, nodding.

“Yeah,” he says, setting his backpack down on the coffee table. “Upstate. Your apartment. Very nice.”

“You want something to drink?” I ask him. “Water?”

“Yeah, I’ll have some water. Bathroom?”

“That door right there,” I say, pointing.

I leave him to it, heading into the kitchen to get him some water. As I’m reaching for a glass, I notice there’s a spider on the shelf. It’s a small one, much smaller than Ralph, even at his normal size. The spider stays perfectly still.

“Don’t worry,” I tell it. “You can stay here.”

It doesn’t acknowledge my presence.

I’m suddenly stricken with a profound devastation over Ralph’s absence. I miss him. The thought of never seeing him again, it weakens my knees. Literally weakens them. I have to lean against the counter to keep myself standing.

“You okay?” Sam asks. He’s behind me.

“Yeah,” I say. “I went running this morning. My legs are sore.”

“Remember when we used to go running?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I remember.”

I fill the glass and hand it to him. He drinks it down, then puts the empty glass in the sink.

“So,” he says, “this is where you’ve been.”

“This is where I’ve been,” I repeat. Somehow, I didn’t anticipate reuniting with my ex being so awkward.

I’m amazed by my own mind. What it’s able to accept. What it’s able to overlook.

I stare at the empty glass in the sink. I hate myself.

“I’m tired,” Sam says, yawning.

“You want some coffee? There’s a place nearby.” I realize as soon as the words leave my mouth that I can’t just go waltzing back into town, into the Good Mug. Oskar might try to stone me in the street.

The thought yields a surge of empathy for Sophie. I mean, didn’t she say she was thrown down the well? That couldn’t have been fun. And she’s alluded to worse. Attempted drownings, watching her friends get burned at the stake. What must it have been like to be ostracized and attacked, harassed, villainized?

I realize I don’t know what she’s been through. So much of her past is unknown to me. I think back to all the times I caught her staring off into the distance, all the times she went quiet, lost in thought.

I’ve been so preoccupied by my own pain; not once did I ever stop to consider hers.

“Nah,” Sam says, sauntering over to the window, perusing the yard. “Just got here. I want to stay here.”

“Okay,” I say. I should be relishing the sweet relief that Sam doesn’t want to leave the apartment, but I’m still thinking about Sophie.

Am I being hypocritical? I made Dan spit bones when he was being a jerk to me at dinner. I didn’t mean to, but I did it. What would I do if someone seriously tried to hurt me?

Is it really so wrong to stand up for yourself? To punish those who deserve it, maybe take a little revenge?

“You got any food?”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, trying to shake Sophie out of my head. “Sorry.”

“What you got?”

“I could make you a sandwich,” I say.

“Tell me more about this sandwich.”

We end up eating chicken-and-tomato sandwiches while sitting at the table in total silence. I give him my crusts, and he eats them.

The only thing worse than the excruciating lack of conversation is the fact that now instead of thinking about Sophie, I’m back to thinking about Ralph. I can’t stop picturing his cute, fuzzy little face. His delightful smile.

“So,” Sam says, wiping a crumb from his bottom lip, “this is weird.”

“Yeah,” I say, “just a bit.”

He laughs. It’s dull and polite.

I need to get my head in the game. If this is a test, I’m failing. I need to do something to show him that I’m worth loving.

“I think we could make it work,” I say. “I think we should give it another shot. I’ll try harder. I’ll be better. Tell me what I need to fix, and I’ll do it.”

He laughs that laugh again. It’s a sterile laugh.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing. It’s just . . . I’ve been thinking a lot about us. Our relationship. When anyone asked me, when I told my parents, I always said that we broke up because we were more like friends than like a couple. But lately, I wonder why that was a bad thing, you know?”

“I know.”

My anxiety begins to evaporate, to fizz away like an Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving into fine grains of nothing.

He sighs. “I should have said something sooner. We could have talked about it.”

“Yeah,” I say. I should leave it at that, a simple agreement. But my time with Sophie has encouraged both confidence and the desire to seek what I believe I deserve. And I have a question that I want answered. So I ask it. “Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I what? Talk to you about it sooner? I don’t know. It’s a hard subject. How was I supposed to bring it up? Just out of the blue say, ‘Hey, can we not wear our pajamas all the time?’ ”

This disrupts the ascent of hope.

“Yeah,” I say, “I get it.”

“Obviously that’s not the best way to put it. But you wore pajamas a lot,” he says.

“I did,” I say.

It’s true. I wore pajamas a lot. I didn’t realize. I didn’t know.

“I wanted to ask you not to, but it felt like a dick thing to say,” he says. “It’s hard to be attracted to someone in pajamas.”

“They make sexy pajamas,” I say, looking down at my lap. I turn my fingers into the itsy-bitsy spider, climbing, climbing. I really miss Ralph. “I guess I should have invested in sexy pajamas. Would have saved me a lot of trouble in the long run. If you’d asked, I would have gotten them.”

“Please don’t take it the wrong way. I’m not saying it’s all on you. I did things, too. Or didn’t do them. I didn’t make time for you. I didn’t take you out on dates. I could have taken you out on dates. Had a date night or something. That just seemed like—I don’t know—an old-person thing to do. To have a designated date night. I don’t know. I don’t want you to think I’m blaming you.”

“No, no,” I say. “I don’t.”

Why do I work so hard to appease him? It’s exhausting. I’m so quick to kowtow to his every need. Was it always like this?

“It happens, I guess. You get comfortable, stop putting in that effort. If we could work out that part of it. Be with each other again, like we were at the beginning. I think it’d help us figure out if we should get back together.”

“You want to get back together?” I ask, and I hear it in the pitch of my voice. A flimsy, pathetic hope.

I know if he says yes, it’s a done deal. I’ll pack my shit, quit my job. I’ll go back to the city with him. I’ll stay with him as long as he’ll have me.

A few months ago, I would have been able to do that without any doubts, without any modicum of shame. But now, turns out the idea of abandoning my new life just because he asks me to completely vandalizes the sense of self I’ve been slowly and painstakingly assembling.

“If,” Sam says, and I feel like Wile E. Coyote looking up to see the anvil about to fall on his head. “If we’re able to be with each other again. Get back to how it was.”

“Right,” I say. “Can you be more specific?”

“Let’s just hang out for a while,” he says. “Remember when we’d lie in bed for hours and just hang out?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I remember everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yep.”

“What’d we do on our third date?”

“We got dollar slices, then went to Sly Fox and split a pitcher of beer.”

“They should study you,” he says. “Let’s sit on the couch.”

It’s strange to be near him again. I imagine it’s like returning to your childhood home as an adult. The comfort and nostalgia eclipsed by the distortion of the dimensions. You remember it being bigger than it is. Because you’re bigger than you were.

“This really is a nice place,” he says. “You like it here?”

I shrug. If he’d asked me, say, eight days ago, my answer would have been yes. I would have said the people are nice, a little strange, quirky but endearing. My apartment is great; maybe I wish the bathroom were a little bigger, but it’s otherwise perfect. I’m minutes away from amazing coffee, and when the weather is warm, there’s a farmers market every Saturday. And I have a caring, smart, funny friend. A friend who saw something in me that no one else ever did. Not even you.

But . . . a lot can change in a matter of days.

“How’s work?” he asks.

I tell him about my job, about how the pushy vice principal set me up on a blind double date. I tell him because I want to see how he’ll react. If he’ll get jealous.

“How’d it go?” he asks.

I consider sugarcoating, but instead I say, “Bad.”

I tell him about Pascal, whom I describe as having the personality and general vibe of a ventriloquist’s dummy sans ventriloquist.

“He barely said a word the entire night.”

“Was he a creep?”

“If he had any defining personality traits, maybe, but he didn’t. It was pretty incredible.”

I tell him about Dan, about how he was rude and obnoxious. I say he choked on his food and someone had to come perform the Heimlich. I don’t know how I invent this alternate history so easily. I guess when telling the truth isn’t an option, lies will always be there. They’re opportunists. They’re dandelions.

“It was this awful German-themed restaurant,” I say.

“No,” Sam says, “I don’t believe you.”

“I swear,” I say. “Beer steins everywhere. Everywhere.”

“Yodeling?” he asks.

“No yodeling. Is yodeling German?”

We ask the Internet. We fall down weird rabbit holes. Soon we’re looking up conspiracy theories about the Dyatlov Pass incident.

“Yeti,” he says. “All evidence points to yeti.”

I’d laugh him off, but . . . who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t?

Certainly not me.

“This is it,” he says. “This is what I missed.”

“Discussing the mysterious deaths of Russian hikers?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Discussing the mysterious deaths of Russian hikers with you.”

I feel a swell of affection for him. When we were together, everything was simple. I knew who I was, what I wanted. I ache for that sense of certainty. With Sam, I know exactly what my future looks like. There’s nothing scary about it. Nothing unknown.

I lean across the couch and kiss him.

I forgot what it is like to kiss. I forget how. My tongue remains limp in my mouth, suddenly heavy and inert, like a walrus on a rock. He prods at it with his. He has a very warm tongue. Very agile. I wait for some kind of rhythm, an implicit understanding of what should go where when, but it doesn’t come. It’s a clumsy exchange.

I pull away, wiping my bottom lip.

“You smell different,” he says into my neck.

“Do you like it?” I ask.

“I liked your old perfume.”

“Oh,” I say. It bothers me probably more than it should. I know he doesn’t mean anything by it, but I like this scent. I chose it myself.

“You smell good,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

I wasn’t worried.

“Here, I brought you something,” he says, opening his backpack and gifting me a license plate key chain with my name on it.

It’s a goofy gift, but I like goofy gifts.

“I’m going to ask you something,” I say. “And I don’t want you to be offended. But did you get this on the way here?”

“I’m offended,” he says. “I’m so offended.”

He kisses me.

Is this what I’ve been missing?

Is this what I’ve spent so much time mourning the loss of?

I wait for a sensation to travel through me, something warm and effervescent. I wait and wait, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything. Except his wet tongue as it slips in and out of my mouth.

No,I tell myself. Stop.Focus.You want this. This is what you want, what you’ve always wanted.

“I made cookies,” I say, breaking out of the kiss.

“Did you?” he asks.

“Yep, let me get them,” I say, absconding into the kitchen.

I arrange the cookies on a plate and pour two glasses of milk.

I shoo my doubt. I tell myself repeatedly, You want this. This is what you want. You want him. A life with him.

When I bring the cookies out, he says, “Be honest. Did you really make these, or did you buy them and put them on a plate?”

“I made them,” I say, annoyed.

“Was just a joke,” he says, putting his hands up. “Relax.”

“I made them for you,” I say in disbelief. I spent my time—time I could have spent doing anything else—measuring flour, sugar, vanilla, cracking eggs, watching the oven to make sure the cookies didn’t burn. And just now I got up. I brought them to him with milk. And he doesn’t even care. He’s eating one like it’s nothing. Like they just magically appeared. Not so much as a thank-you.

Has he ever thanked me?

“I’m really happy,” he says, licking some chocolate from the corner of his mouth. “This is what was missing. Us being together. Being present with each other. Paying attention. Gestures.”

He helps himself to another cookie.

What he missed was me revolving my entire world around him. He broke up with me, and I took fucking turns with him sleeping on the futon.

I was always present. I was always paying attention, always making gestures. I never stopped. He just started taking it for granted.

And maybe I wasn’t in lingerie every night; maybe I did spend some weekends sleeping in and binge-watching TV in sweats and no makeup, my hair a mess. Maybe I had the audacity to be human.

Only I’m not human.

Not really.

“These are amazing,” he says. “You’re amazing.”

He slips his hand onto my thigh, and I study his face. I realize now he hasn’t changed. Nothing about him has changed. He doesn’t look any different, but I see him differently.

Because he hurt me, and I’ll never look at him the same.

“I still love you,” he says. “I never stopped. I want you back in my life.”

Before I can process, before I can form thoughts or words, he kisses me.

Suddenly, he’s on top of me. His hands are quick and busy.

“I’ve missed you so much,” he breathes into my ear.

I take a deep inhale to calm myself and clear my mind, but Sam interprets this as an indicator of pleasure and grabs a fistful of my hair.

“Stop.”

“What?” he asks.

The old me would have just gone with it, done whatever he wanted. Endured, hoped for enjoyment or, if that didn’t come, for it to end quickly.

I wonder how much of a woman’s life is spent this way. Enduring. Waiting for enjoyment or, fuck it, death.

“Stop,” I say. He lets go of my hair, not quite understanding my demand. I pull my arms out from under him and push him back. “Stop. I don’t want this. It’s not what I want.”

He gets off of me. His hair is messy, his eyes stark. It’s an alarmingly similar feeling to that of staring directly into the sunken eyes of a ghost.

Sophie was right. It’s too late now.

I know what it’s like not to have to endure. I know what it’s like to manifest things through sheer force of will. I’ve smashed teacups, broken glass, forced bones into someone’s mouth. I’ve made these things happen with my mind. Manipulated the physical world with my thoughts, with my desires.

There’s no going back to Sam. To sitting at the kitchen table in the morning eating eggs and joking around, all the while wondering what he wants from me, how I can make him happy.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him.

“I don’t understand,” he says, literally scratching his head.

I stand up.

There’s something new pulsing through me. Or not new. Awakened. An electricity. A vibrance. There’s glitter in my veins.

“I don’t want this,” I tell him. “I don’t want you anymore.”

The look on his face is so delicious I could eat it. I could eat it in one bite.

“I think you should go,” I say. “I’ll give you a minute.”

I walk into the bathroom, closing the door behind me so I can take a moment to admire myself. I linger in a reciprocal gaze with my reflection.

We’re smiling.

“Tell me the truth,” I say to her.

She does.

You must surrender everything for everything.

“I’m ready now,” I tell her. “I surrender.”

I surrender,she says back.

It’s transcendent. An injection of straight sunshine. Pure fucking gold. It binds bone and sinew. It’s in me; it’s of me. It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me.

He’s talking to someone.

“Just guy stuff . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Miss you, too. Tomorrow night? Yeah, but make reservations. They’re always crowded. . . . Okay . . . Me, too. Bye.”

“Who was that?” I ask. But I already know.

He’s standing in the kitchen with his phone in his hand. Guilty.

“Annie,” he says, “are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Actually, I’m feeling pretty incredible.”

For the first time in our relationship, I’m in control. And what makes it extra sweet is that he knows it. He’s squirming in the corner.

“Ow,” he says. “What’s happening?”

His legs give out from underneath him, and he falls to the floor.

“You’re still with her, huh?” I say “Shannon.”

“Annie, what’s happening?”

I ease up, and he stops his wriggling.

“You didn’t break up with her before coming to see me, did you? Tell me the truth,” I say, reaching out my hand and pinching the air.

He screams, clutching his kneecap.

I release my fingers.

“No,” he cries. “I’m sorry.”

“Insurance,” I say. “Smart. In case things didn’t work out with us, you wouldn’t end up alone.”

“I wanted you,” he says. “I wanted things to work out between us— Ahhh!”

This, this I’m not doing intentionally.

He’s writhing around on the floor, his limbs twitching madly, his face gravely distorted. There’s blood coming out of his eyes. Not in neat drops, not in tears, but in a steady stream.

“Annie!” he screams. Blood begins to spray from his mouth now, too.

I close my eyes and take deep, unhurried breaths. If I can calm down, maybe I can make it stop. But . . . it’s hard to let go of my animosity at the moment. It’s hard not to torture him when it’s so easy. When I can.

I open my eyes, and he’s turning a pale blue color. I admire it for a second, the color, before realizing he might be dying. I might be killing him.

With that, he scrambles to his hands and knees, wheezing.

I allow him to catch his breath. He manages to pull himself up and prop himself against the fridge.

“What the fuck?” he keeps saying. “What the fuck?”

“I gave you so much of myself,” I say, “and you wasted me.”

His face. Such pure, exquisite horror. Such fear.

I don’t mind. He fears me because he is small. I will not meet him there. I will not shrink myself down to his size, or anyone else’s, for their comfort. For their appeasement.

I actually find it kind of amusing, his fear. Kind of funny. It’s making me laugh.

I laugh.

No.

I cackle.

“I believe we’re done here,” I tell him. “Leave.”

He rushes, tripping over himself as he grabs his backpack.

“Sam,” I say.

He turns to me, a nervous glance over his shoulder.

“You never told me if you liked my hair.”

I go on cackling, though he doesn’t seem to find it too humorous. I guess that’s fair.

“Good-bye,” I tell him. “And thank you.”

With that, he’s gone.

“Well,” I say to myself, listening to the sound of his car speeding out of the driveway, “there goes my dark fate.”

And I know now. I’m finally free of doubt. I’m so glad I’m not with him in that car. I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.

Exactly who I’m meant to be.

What I’m meant to be.