Page 84 of Happy After All

I didn’t want to feel something for the gorgeous disaster of a man who checked into my motel that first summer. I felt something for him all the same.

It had been the wrong time. It all still feels like the wrong time.

If it were the right time, he and I would both be a little bit less ...this. I think.

“I have to start at the beginning,” he says. “Except ... I don’t want to pile all this on you.”

“It’s not piling anything on me,” I say. “Nathan, I feel a lot of empathy for you. I care very deeply about what happened to you. It doesn’t make my grief worse, though. I’m not scared of your grief either. I’ve already felt the worst ... the most hopeless, dark feeling that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I get why people can’t handle it when they haven’t experienced that. Because they don’t want to know. They don’t want to know what you can go through and survive. They don’t want to know how horrible it can be. The stuff you have to keep on living with. But I already know. You’re not traumatizing me. Life did that already.”

It’s true. I’ve never realized how true that is. I can remember clearly one of my friends saying to me afterward that she would never have been able to be as strong as I was. It didn’t feel like a compliment, even though I knew she meant it as one. I had no choice but to keep breathing. To keep going. I didn’t feel strong; I felt weak and broken. I still do.

That’s the real tragedy of it. You go on.

Nathan already knows that.

“Okay. I’m not exactly sure where to start.”

“Start wherever you want. I’ll put it together. I’ll ask questions if I have them. You just ... Tell me whatever you can.”

He’s silent, but then he sets his coffee on the table, moves it one inch to the left just slightly. Then looks up at the ceiling. “My wife and I went to Joshua Tree for our honeymoon. Nine years ago. We stayed here. It was different then. She wanted to go somewhere that was different than Bainbridge Island. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to go to the Bahamas. She wanted to see the desert, so we did.”

Joshua Tree.

That was why yesterday had been so difficult. He didn’t need to connect those dots for me. I am all too familiar with what it’s like towish the grief were old enough to not intrude and to have it push its way in anyway.

“She’s ... she was an Olympic horse jumper. One of the youngest to ever win a gold medal. She did it while she was sick. She didn’t tell anyone. Nobody but family. She worked her whole life for that. Her life ended really shortly afterward. One thing she asked me to do was to write her story. She didn’t want me to be sad, she just wanted her story to be out there. I told her there was no way I was going to be able to do that at home. With all the ... the ghosts of the memories and everything. She told me she would find me a place. So she did. You had the rooms listed, newly refurbished. The Hemingway Suite. She thought that was hilarious. She told me not to drink myself to death. She told me to work on it here. Between my other deadlines. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’ve been doing. I didn’t choose this place, she did.”

He sits there for a long moment staring straight ahead. “And when I walked in and saw you behind the counter, I thought it was some kind of cosmic joke, except I have a hard time believing in anything cosmic at this point, because what was the purpose of any of this? I don’t know.”

I have as many questions now as I did before. More. They’re bubbling up inside me. He’s given me a small piece of his story. His devastating, destructive story that turned his intensity to anger, that turned his depth into a pool that’s drowning him.

I can only imagine thatbeforehe loved as fiercely as he does everything else.

He lost his wife. Of course it destroyed him.

Because he is the decent hero of a man I believed him to be. Not a cheater, not a basic, sorry excuse for a husband. He’s wrecked, though, because of that, and it kills me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Because again, I know that sometimes it’s the best thing. The only thing. Everything is insufficient, but saying something is better than saying nothing. “She sounds amazing.”

“She was.”

I’m surprised I don’t remember a news story about this. Nathan is relatively famous, and she was an Olympian, and young, and there have been large swaths of time in my life where I’ve clicked on a lot of sad news articles, crying over strangers. I’m inherently interested in people, and curious about things even when they might make me sad.

I couldn’t be, though, when I lost the baby. I wasn’t reading sad news stories, or any stories at all.

I think we were both losing everything around the same time.

I want to ask him so many things. How he met her. Who he was before. I don’t want to push him away either. We have two weeks left. I want every minute, but I wanthim.

This is all part of him.

“Can I ... ask you about yourself?”

He clears his throat. “We’ve slept together, Amelia.”

“Okay. So. Were you . . . Did you used to be . . . ?”

“More fun?”

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