Page 101 of Dirty Ink

“I will never forgive myself.”

I didn’t mean to scare the nurse. She was just doing her job. She was just trying to be as kind and gentle as possible while doing it. She didn’t deserve to get frightened. To jolt back. To gasp and cover her mouth when I screamed and hurled my phone against the wall. When I decided that wasn’t enough, I drove my fists through the drywall, crushing the shattered pieces of my phone beneath my boots. When I lost myself so completely in my rage and grief that I didn’t even realise she was no longer there to apologise to. She’d run off to get security. I was being dragged away.

It seemed I blinked and I was in a chair. In an empty hallway. A different one from before. No holes in the wall. No shattered phone. It was the morgue. I blinked and it was another chair, another hallway. The funeral home. I blinked and it was another chair, another hallway. The crematorium. Plenty of holes in the fucking wall there.

I blinked and it wasn’t a chair, but a bed. An empty one. Not a hallway, but a room. An empty one. I stared at the ceiling and hot tears poured from the corners of my eyes to stain the pillow. Because there was one person I wanted to call. One person I wanted to ask for comfort. For support. For love. There was only one person I wanted to call and it was the one person I couldn’t.

Rachel’s number was broken to pieces in my mind just like the phone had been on that hospital floor. I could grasp at a digit here and there, but it was as useless as half a phone battery, its edges sharp enough to slice straight through your palm.

It was days later (I wasn’t sure how many) and I was just realising that I had no way to contact the woman I loved, an ocean apart, but it might have well been a whole lifetime away.

I couldn’t hold the shattered phone in my hands. Couldn’t even try to begin to piece it back together. It had surely been swept up by some janitor. Thrown into a black plastic bag. I imagined the shards of glass tumbling from the back of a dump truck. Rain splattering the dark, empty screen.

And Rachel’s number there. Somewhere. But unreachable. Lost in the dark.

It was what I deserved. To be alone like my nan had been alone. To expect someone to be there and be proved wrong. To lie there and know it was my fault.

All my fault.

I will never forgive myself.

Rachel

Happy endings aren’t supposed to feel so shitty…are they?

Mason’s fingers played gently with mine in the little space between our crossed legs on the bedsheet. Lamplight cast over us softly like the glow of that Exit sign on the stage where we sat surrounded by half the takeout in Vegas. Our knees didn’t touch, but occasionally when one of us sighed deeply or reached for another biscuit, they brushed briefly.

The rain still pattered against the window in Mason’s bedroom, but it was gentler now. It had lost all its rage. It fell peacefully. Dripped down the windowpane instead of lashing it like a whip.

My fingers shook slightly as I took up my saucer and teacup. The lemon ginger tea had been diluted with so many refills from the pot resting beside us on a handwoven coaster that the lemon had lost its bite, the ginger its spice. Still I embraced the warmth as I raised it to my lips. I swirled it round my tongue, searching out what I knew had been there before.

“Well, that’s it then,” I said in the silence. Mason had been chasing crumbs along the rumpled sheets; he looked up at me. I said, “I mean, I forgive you. And…and you forgive me.”

I hadn’t meant for the words to come out like a question. Like I wasn’t at all certain of what I was saying. Just like I hadn’t meant for my fingers to shake. My lip to tremble. My heart to doubt. I wanted to be sure. To believe. To grab ahold of my happy ending with wide open arms and never let it go.

But I couldn’t.

Mason nodded in lieu of speaking.

I swallowed. I glanced down into my teacup. The teabag, stripped of its colour, hung limp in the hot water. Nothing left to give.

“Right?” I said when Mason’s pinkie hooked around mine. It should have felt like a key turning in a lock. It should have felt like safety, security. But I couldn’t help but feel that I was trapped on the wrong side of the door. That I was being locked out. That the waters were rising around my feet and the way out was being shut forever.

Mason smiled at me. I searched his smile. I searched it for any of the doubts I was feeling. Any of the sense of unease I felt. I searched to see if in his dimples I could see a shadow like the one over my heart. A foreboding that things weren’t over yet. That we weren’t past the storm. That we were smack dab in the goddamn middle of it.

But Mason’s smile was the smile I remembered. Full of life. Full of love. Eager and allusive, playful and seductive. It was the smile I saw at the bar that very first night. It was the smile I couldn’t remember from our wedding. It was the smile of my dreams.

“I forgive you,” Mason said. I think I would have felt better had he not added after a quick, harsh breath, “I mean, how could I not? Knowing what I know now.”

I’d told him everything. How I came back to find him gone. How I discovered his number disconnected. How in my mind there was nothing to wait for. Part of me wished that he had yelled. That he had screamed. That he had accused me of not believing in us. Of not trusting him. Part of me wished that he said that I took the first chance I got to get out of there. That he asked how long I waited before cleaning out my apartment and skipping town. That he insisted that I was always going to leave, that I was never going to stay with him, that if it hadn’t been then, it would have been some other time. Further down the road. But inevitable.

Part of me wanted him to break something. To put a fist through a wall. To shatter a lamp, overturn a dresser, tear a door from its hinges. Part of me wanted to cower beneath his rage, shiver in the trembling length of his towering shadow. I wanted the dam to break, to finally fucking break.

I wanted it to sweep me away. Maybe forever.

But it was my turn to smile. My turn to say, and believe it, really truly believe it, “And I forgive you.” I too added, after a second’s hesitation and an inhale like I’d forgotten something very important, “Really, how could I not?”

His nan was in the hospital. She raised him when his mother left. She was his rock in a world that kept knocking him off his feet. He’d had to go. Fear and panic throw thinking straight out the window. I believed him when he said he considered leaving a note but felt he didn’t have the time. My heart broke with him when he told me how he just missed an earlier flight that could have gotten him there in time to say goodbye. I felt his anguish over that hesitation, over those precious minutes lost. And I went through the same what ifs that he had: what if he had just run out the door with his passport and credit card? What if he’d thought just to send me a message in the cab instead of pausing there, anguishing there at the doorway? Or what if he’d never met me? What if he’d gone back with his friends? What if he was fifteen minutes away instead of fifteen hours?

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