Page 89 of The Rom-Commers

“Isn’t that the point of being married, though? So you can intersect?”

“I guess that’s why we’re not married anymore.”

“So—” I was still trying to wrap my head around it. “You told her you had cancer, and she told you she wanted a divorce?”

“Kind of. But not in that order. When she got home that night, I said, ‘I have something to tell you,’ and she said, ‘I have something to tell you,’ and then we did a ‘you go first; no, you go first’ thing for a while, and then finally we decided to just say our things at the same time. So I said, ‘I have cancer,’ just as she said, ‘I want a divorce.’”

I swallowed. “Brutal.”

“Yeah.”

“She tried to take it back after that, but I said, ‘You can’t take it back. It’s already out there.’”

“So you just—went through everything alone?”

“My sister came to stay a couple of times, but my dad’s not in great health and couldn’t make the trip. Logan helped out. And Jack and I played a lot of video games.”

“What about your mom?”

“She left when I was a kid.” And then, like he was putting something together for the first time, he frowned and said, “When I was sick, actually.”

“When you weresick?”

“I never talk about this.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes my mom sound so awful, what she did. But my dad wasn’t exactly a dream, either.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

Charlie looked at me like he was deciding. “I’ll tell you. Just don’t, like, retell it in an interview.”

“Nobody’s interviewing me, Charlie.”

Charlie tilted his head. “Yet,” he said. Then he said, “I was eight, and I was obsessed with Harry Houdini. I’d seen that movie about him—you know the one where he unties all the ropes underwater?”

I nodded.

“My sister and I were making a kid version of that movie on our dad’s camcorder, and I was going to do that trick, and she was going to film it. We’d studied the scene and taken notes, and I’d practiced untying the knots like five hundred times with a stopwatch. And so one night we tied my hands and feet and I jumped into the pool, but we’d used the wrong rope, and it plumped up once it got wet, and I couldn’t get the knots undone. My sister had a timer, and when I hadn’t surfaced in twenty seconds, she ran to get our dad—but our parents were having this epic fight, which they did sometimes, and she couldn’t get their attention right away. By the time our dad pulled me out, I’d inhaled a bunch of water and I was pretty hysterical.”

“Wow,” I said. “No wonder you don’t swim.”

“After a few minutes, I was okay, and they put me to bed, but later that night I woke up and couldn’t stop throwing up, and it turned out I had this thing called ‘secondary drowning’ where your lungs have kind of a delayed reaction, and I had to spend the night in the pediatric ICU getting fluids and supplemental oxygen. But the thing was, my parents weren’t just fighting that night. They were breaking up. My mom was leaving. And so when I woke up that night, and only my dad was there, I kind of knew.”

I felt a wave of indignation. “Wait! Your mom left your dadon the night her child almost drowned?”

“In her defense, my timing wasn’t great.”

“But… howcouldshe?” I protested, as if that moment had been written wrong and we needed to revise it.

But Charlie was coming to a bigger realization. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t want to tell Margaux I was sick.” Charlie looked at me, frowning. “Could that be it?”

“Uh, yeah. Hello. That is textbook subconscious nonsense. Didn’t you take psych in college?”

“So…” Charlie said, still snapping the pieces into place. “My mom left when I was sick, and my wife left when I was sick.”

“But now you’redying,” I said, gesturing at the valley below with my eyes. “And another woman in your life”—I pointed at myself—“is not going anywhere.”

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