Page 85 of Hold on Tight

He’d taken a slug from the first glass. It burned going down like he was a high school girl who’d never drunk the stuff before, and it tasted like failure in his mouth.

Goddamn her; she’d taken everything away, even his old refuges in self-pity and self-annihilation.

In his mind’s eye, he could see them, standing together, Aaron and Mira, Sam at Mira’s elbow.Family.

He threw the glass. It struck the far wall of his kitchen and shattered. The sharp smell of whiskey saturated the air.

Run.

It was something in the back of his reptilian brain, something older than the voice that had claimed Mira or the voice that had renounced her. It was the oldest voice back there, down there, the most primitive, the most fundamental.

If you can’t fight, run.

He poured out the other two glasses and went into his tiny bedroom. He sat on the bed and strapped on his running prosthesis.

He ran along the waterfront to Myrtle Edwards Park, passing the cruise ships, as intricate and populous as small cities and drawn up into the curve of the bay like baby whales nursing, into the Sculpture Park. His back, his arms, his good leg, his residual leg—as well as his chest and his heart—loosened as he ran, as if air was flowing into all of them, breath, the breath of the world. By the big red sculpture that looked to him like a giraffe crossed with an elephant, by the giant typewriter eraser with its waving fronds, past the Eye Benches with their black obsidian folds, scrutinizing him. Seeing into the heart of his pain and loss. He wanted to call out to them, to the black eyes themselves, to the people seated on the benches, smiling, holding hands, gazing at the stretch of green grass, the sculptures jutting up, whimsical, toward the perfectly blue sky,What do you see?

What had she seen, what exactly, when he’d told her the truth about what he’d done? What he hadn’t done? She had looked at him with sympathy, as if she saw into the center of him, and she had guessed, correctly, at some of what had passed through his mind, for better or for worse, during the moments when he’d tried to decide what the hell to do about his best friend, who was struggling with demons that might overtake him without a mission to drown them in …

He ran.

It hurt.

When it was hurting, he did not think about Mira.

Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday.

She went to work. She still had a job, though her boss had warned her that she was now inlast last-chancemode. She did what had to be done, a foggy, dutiful slog. She ate lunch with Opal, giving her a quick-and-dirty version of what had transpired. “You were right. ‘Not supposed to’ is a flimsy barrier against that kind of chemistry. But it’s over now.”

Opal had questions in her eyes but didn’t voice them aloud. She kept Mira entertained with funny stories about rejected marketing campaigns and her own recent bout of awful blind dates.

Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. A procession of days accomplished. Marked off. Mira came home from work. She thanked Aaron for his help. She did not invite him to stay, not even when he lingered, awkwardly. Not even when he offered to pick up takeout. Not even when he asked, “Hey, what if I invited myself to dinner?”

“I’d politely decline,” she said.

“We need to talk.”

“I can’t.”

His eyes were hurt, but he didn’t push it, and she was grateful. Not grateful enough to invite him to stay, but grateful.

Each night she tucked Sam into bed and answered questions to which she didn’t know the answers.Why hasn’t Aaron been sleeping over? When will we see Jake again? Why hasn’t Jake been sleeping over? I can still call him Dad even though he’s not sleeping over, right? Does this mean you’re not going to live together? Does that mean it’s a divorce?

She did her best. She felt dry and brittle, like old paper. She felt hurt and angry and weirdly relieved, because here they were, on their own, and she could still do it, could still tuck Sam into bed each night, go to work each morning. They were surviving, and one day she’d be less hurt and angry and they’d begin thriving, she and Sam, taking care of themselves. And it wouldn’t matter that after only two nights of occupation, one of which had been down at the beach, Jake’s side of the bed felt empty, a dark, expansive canyon of absence.

On Thursday, Mira left Sam with his former physical therapist, who had the day off. Because Aaron had things to do. Jobs to get and houses to hunt, and …

He’d flown across the country, apologized, proposed, and now he was arranging his life to make room for her as his wife. And she hadn’t heard a word from Jake.

She acknowledged to herself that she had reached the end of some road. That she could not avoid answering Aaron’s proposal forever. She owed him a decision. She owed him a conversation. She owed him serious consideration.

On Friday, when she came home from work, tired, so tired, her whole body aching like she had the flu, and he offered to pick up takeout for the three of them, she let him.

When Sam was in bed, she sat with him at the kitchen table. Not so long ago, she’d sat with Jake at this same table, and the air in the room had hummed and crackled and made every hair on her body stand on end, every last cell and fiber straining toward him.

Now the air in the room was dead. Heavy, as if with grief.

She knew. She knew from the fact that she’d chosen to talk with Aaron at the kitchen table, with a flat expanse of oak between them, and hadn’t handed him a drink or invited him into the living room. She knew that no matter what he said to her, he wasn’t going to change her mind, because it wasn’t her mind’s decision to make, anyway. It was her heart’s, and her heart was aligned, like the rest of her, with Jake’s magnetic north. No matter how badly he’d rejected her, no matter how well she understood that this was probably the best thing for her, no matter how sweetly simple had unfolded into complicated and no matter how violently it had collapsed back in on itself, like some kind of star with too much gravity to endure, no amount of talk, no amount of convincing, could talk her into believing that marrying Aaron would make her happy.

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