Page 113 of Happy After All

“Why not?”

“FuckingFuck,” I say.

“Oh. It’s him?”

I look over at him, and I see the tension in his forearms, the way his hands tightened on the steering wheel.

I’m satisfied by the fact that Christopher creates this level of tension in him as well.

“You do realize you have to see him this weekend?”

“Yes,” I say, redirecting. “But it won’t be on the phone. It won’t be because he decided to break years of silence. It won’t be in a moment with no one there so he can say whatever he wants. I’m going to stand next to you, and I’m going to introduce you, and I’m going to say that I own a motel here. That I write books now. That I’m very happy to see him. Then I’m going to congratulate him on his new life, and his new fiancée, and his new baby.” My eyes fill with tears, and I’m not even sure why.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says.

“No, I don’t, though I think it would make my life a lot better if I did. I think I would feel better. I think I would feel like I had drawn a line under it, or something.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“No.” I’m aware there’s a terrible irony to that because we are currently speeding toward Bakersfield, where I intend to say some very stark things to my mother, and I’m still not sure what I want to say to Christopher. Or if I want to tell him the truth. I’m not even sure what the truth is.

I sit there, staring at the road and the way it rolls in waves over the farmland, dry and difficult.

“I don’t love him,” I say. “I know that. I’m sure of it. I think I wouldn’t be with him even if ... even if Emma had lived.”

This is my first time saying her name to Nathan. This is my first time trying to honor that world while I’m living in this one. It’s given me a good place to put it. Sometimes I think that is maybe the best thing you can do with grief. Because you’re going to live with it. It’s going to be with you. How do you carry it so it doesn’t get too heavy? I don’t want to forget her. I don’t want to believe that the loss was meant to be. I can accept that there was the potential for a life, for a world, that there is no longer a potential for. That I live in a different world because of that loss. I can honor that while living. While I write myself a new story, while I put myself into a new world, full of new possibilities.

“You think so?”

“I know so,” I say. “The problems that we had, they would’ve been the problems no matter what. The things that he ... I was so broken when I lost her. I couldn’t be the woman he wanted me to be.”

I stare out the car window at the cracked, faded road. The yellow grass and rocky hills. “Fundamentally, the way we deal with hard things is so different. I was too ... lost. In my own grief. I’m not saying it was something I did wrong, but I could never have found a way to meet him in the middle even if I had wanted to. Even if it had occurred to me. He certainly didn’t try with me. He was frustrated. I was lagging behind him as far as he was concerned. He wanted to get back to the way things had been. Then, when I couldn’t meet his needs, rather than continuing to try with me, he found somebody else. That’s the bottom line. I’m not saying he can’t change now. I’m not saying he can’t make a different decision with this woman he’s engaged to now. But unless he’s dealt with the thing that made him treat me the way he did, he’ll do the same thing to her. Even if we hadn’t lost her, I think eventually he would have cheated. Not because there’s something wrong with me.”

Those words are a revelation. A breakthrough. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I say. There is no noise, except the tires on the road. I let out a long breath. “There isnothing wrong with me.”

“No,” Nathan says. “Of course there’s not.”

“I felt like there was. For ... always.Always.How could I not? My dad left because he loved another woman so much that he had to be with her. And not with me. My mom can only love herself. The way I carried a baby was wrong. The way I grieved that baby was wrong. At least as far as he was concerned. I’m not the problem, though. I’m not.”

“Amelia,” he says. “I consider myself incredibly lucky to have found somebody who accepted me the way that I was. The truth is, somebody who’s been made to feel like you do, all of your life, someone who felt the way I did because of my dad, we are way more likely to keep repeating that cycle in every relationship we have. Because we’ll take anything.”

His wisdom is surprising, and definitely true.

“Did you take anything before you met Sarah?”

“Yeah. I had a history of it. I’m over six feet tall and I have a job. So I never had trouble finding women to date me. I had trouble getting them to accept that I wasn’t what they initially fantasized I might be. They thought I was G.I. Joe. That I was going to be their military boyfriend fantasy. Then I spent more time reading books than they wanted me to. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t do the party thing. I didn’t ... I didn’t give them what they wanted. For a long time, I let that affect me. I figured ... it was something wrong with me, because ...”

“You always got treated like there was something wrong with you.”

This is Psychology 101, and I know it. But having it laid out for me like this, having it spoken so plainly, and about my issues, is both jarring and revelatory.

In the back of my mind, there is always this little wheedling voice that says I was the commonality in all these relationships. The truth is, my parents taught me to take nothing. They taught me that sharing the deepest parts of myself didn’t matter. That my feelings weren’timportant. That the things I cared about weren’t important. Then I met a man who treated me better than that, because Chris had. For a long time he had. When I met him, I wasn’t critical of some of the other issues.

I should have been. “Thank you for coming with me on this four-hour car ride of childhood trauma.”

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

I choose not to dig too deeply into that, but I also choose not to question it. I let that assurance wash over me. I feel something stirring deep inside me. I don’t want to give words to it. I don’t even want to give it a voice. It still echoes loudly in my head and my heart all the same.

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