Page 53 of The Cabin
On the vanity, a Jonathan Adler candle, another of my favorites. In the drawers, my favorite brands of makeup. Eye shadows, foundations, lip gloss and lipstick and lip stain, lip pencils, eyes pencils, contouring sponges, everything you’d find in my makeup kit back home, is here.
In the bathroom, there is more of everything me. In the medicine cabinet is my favorite mouthwash, face wash, hand lotion, body butter, moisturizer, razor, shaving cream, everything. Even the damn towels folded on a floating shelf over the toilet are my favorite kind, the thick, soft, enormous bath sheets. My shampoos and conditioners and everything, it’s all here.
It hits me, there, in the bathroom.
Adrian just knew me.
I’ll never find that again. No one could ever know me the way he did. He knew every single thing there was to know about me, from my absurd but paralyzing fear of wasps to my deep, abiding, passionate love affair with mint chocolate chip ice cream. My most embarrassing moments, he knew—including that mortifying wardrobe malfunction in high school, every teenager’s worst nightmare come true, when my skirt literally fell off in the middle of an end-of-the-year speech in front of the entire school, leaving me in front of a microphone stand in my white granny panties, complete with visible maxi pad. Oh yeah. That bad. He knew about it. He knew my sexual peccadilloes, my hatred of lima beans, my obsession with New Kids on the Block, my “celebrity hall pass” list that consisted exclusively of Justin Timberlake and Hugh Jackman.
He knew it all.
He knew my makeup.
I fall to the floor in the bathroom, sobbing. I have a tube of lotion still clutched in one hand; the subway tile under me is cold and hard. I cry harder than I have since right after he died.
God, I miss you, Adrian.
I miss you so fucking bad.
This cabin is a love letter from Adrian. It said everything that language could not possibly begin to express. His intimate knowledge of everything I am as a person, as a woman. It’s him telling me, I know you, Nadia. I know you, and I love you. This is my gift to you.
I sob on the floor for a long, long time. Missing him. Hating him for leaving. Hating the world for taking him. Hating myself for needing him so badly I can’t figure out how to exist without him.
It’s there, lying with my cheek squashed against the icy tile floor, that I realize how angry I am. I hadn’t understood that until now. It’s a white-hot rage. At him. For leaving. He promised he wouldn’t leave me, and he fucking left me.
My intellect understands that he died, that he didn’t walk away from me. But my emotions know only one thing: he left.
God help me, I’m so angry. I’ve been avoiding and denying that anger for so long, now. The anger is there, simmering, boiling under the surface, and I’ve been ignoring it. It’s why I can’t sleep. Why I can’t eat—I have no appetite, and when I do eat, food is tasteless.
It’s not just sadness, not just missing him.
I’m so angry at him for dying that it’s been poisoning me.
This cabin is the antitoxin I need, apparently. How he knew, I’ll never know. But he did.I eventually manage to scrape myself off the bathroom floor. When I do, I have an imprint of tiles on my reddened cheek. I go out and haul my bags inside and I unpack every damn thing Tess packed for me, which is just about my entire wardrobe. I put everything away; fill all the drawers with my clothes and the shallow but wide closet with my dresses and my shoes and my boots.
I make myself at home.
Because somehow, I realize I won’t be leaving here any time soon. I can’t leave here until I’m whole again, and that will take a long, long time.
When I’m unpacked and my suitcases are shoved under the bed and on the shelf in the closet, I go over to the wine rack in the kitchen. Withdraw a bottle of Josh, slowly uncork it. I haven’t had red wine since before Adrian died—it was our thing. He liked whiskey and I hate it; I like vodka and he hated it. The one thing we could agree on was red wine.
I pour a glass, swirl it, watching the ruby liquid smear down the glass in receding waveforms. Take a tentative sip.
I’m hit with a tidal wave of memories. Sitting on our couch, two bottles in, a giant bowl of popcorn on his lap, marathoning LOTR, which was a yearly thing for him. It bored me to tears, so he’d get me tipsy and then I’d fall asleep. Or, sitting in bed with the iPad and a bar of chocolate, him reading while I binged Vanderpump Rules. Italy, getting drunk on red wine in a street-side cafe in Florence, telling the server to choose the wine for us because who the hell knows anything about all those weird, obscure, Italian name wines anyway? It’s all good, especially once you’re four glasses in and the world is topsy-turvy and beautiful with that golden Italian sunshine.
