Page 3 of The Heartbreak Hotel
Nate gave me creative control over the house (within reason—we were renters). The landlord, a man named Henry I never met, lived in town but didn’t come by. So long as we didn’t do anything obnoxious, Nate said, we could pretty much do what we wanted. With Nate gone so often—on tour, or out of town for press, or staying in Denver for weeklong stints to record with the band—his dream house ultimately became mine. I painted the kitchen a woodsy green and installed vintage light fixtures; I themed each bedroom after a Colorado plant—pine, spruce, lupine, juniper, aspen, fir; I applied peel-and-stickwallpaper in the attic office, where a bay window looked out over the back garden.
There was already help for the garden by the time we moved in, a woman named Joss who came by most summer afternoons to manage our small wilderness. It was just as well; I’ve always been an indoor cat. I wouldn’t have known what to do with the yard, and Joss worked magic out there. On nice days we’d drink lemonade on the porch together when she was through; she was only in her midthirties, and a great storyteller. With Nate gone and all my college friends over an hour away in Denver, it was nice to have Joss around. For the garden, and for me.
There weren’t close neighbors. Each house sat on a wooded lot that elk roamed through at will, grazing on pine needles and bunches of lichen. The house across the street was nearest, a stately cabin where a retired couple from Kansas—Martina and Bill—lived with their old St. Bernard, Custard. He was enormous, bearlike, all droopy jowls and soulful eyes.
When Nate was home we cooked the kinds of simple foods twenty-three-year-olds tend to: pasta with cherry tomatoes from the yard, burgers that Nate grilled on the gas range on the back porch. We went barefoot everywhere and christened every room of the house the way twenty-three-year-olds also do. Nate was gone so often that having him home always felt like Christmas morning: a fleeting, frantic gift. I felt like I could’ve sustained myself on Nate alone, never mind the pasta and the burgers. His mouth and the inner curves of his elbows and the warm skin of his belly pressed to mine. The weight of him. He was always a meal enough for me.
And then he’d be gone again, kissing me on the front steps while Kenji honked at us from the road. When school or clinicalhours prevented me from traveling with him, he’d send me a video of “Purple Girl” after every single show. “This one’s for Lou,” he’d always say. And, eventually, “You all know who this one’s for.” And, after that, only, “Sing along if you know the words.”
I missed Nate when he left. Especially at the start. But the longer I lived in the house, the more I missed it, too, when I was away. If something prevented me from touring with him, it was always tinged with a bit of relief. I wouldn’t have to leave my home, my beautiful refuge in the mountains. I wouldn’t have to wake up without the stained glass above the kitchen sink casting my morning flickering rainbow; I wouldn’t have to fall asleep without the hush of aspen boughs caressing my bedroom window. Goldie and I never stayed in one place for long—growing up was a blur of rentals and motels and living rooms of my mother’s friends. But this house felt like it was mine, more than any place had ever been.
When I whispered this to Nate, my lips at his ear in our quiet, mountain-ringed bedroom, he smiled sleepily in the dark.It’s all for you, Lou, he said. I believed him implicitly. Because I wanted to, because he’d never given me a reason to doubt him, because I’d loved him long before the rest of the world.
Eventually, the house stopped meaning, to Nate, what it had always meant. Eventually, he had all the trappings of a life that anyone could want: rentals in Miami and Los Angeles and a transparent sapphire watch that cost more than my car. It was a mark of the change in us, that the things that had always meant somethingmore—the house, Estes Park, me—were just things again.
I’d intended to start working in the spring, after passing myNational Counselor Examination and officially earning my license. But then there’d been the photo. That woman. And the fallout from all of it, leading like a trail of breadcrumbs to this night.
Instead I spent early summerlanguishing, as Goldie put it. Reading books in my attic office and sitting in the garden with Joss and having weekend-long sleepovers with Mei, my best friend, when she could get away from Denver. I’d let Nate sweep me under the wave of his life. I’d done what Goldie always feared I’d do, what we grew up watching our mother do and be destroyed by: I let a man take care of me.
I’m not sure I even recognized it as it was happening—not really. The sands shifting beneath me, putting me flat on my back in the surf. And even as it all changed around me, I never thought I’d lose it.
I let myself believe—naively, foolishly—that this life was mine for the keeping.
Four
“We’ll find a way foryou to keep it.” Mei’s sitting in my kitchen, slicing a peach. I haven’t eaten since before the concert last night. “You have money saved, yes?”
It’s Friday morning, a workday, but Mei showed up a little past nine.I’ll keep an eye on my email, she said, dismissive, when I balked at her skipping work for so depressing an occasion as my breakup.
Now, she passes the cutting board over the table. She’s arranged the peach slices in a perfect fan, their spiky red centers radiating like small suns. It’s so pretty, my eyes fill with tears. Mei has her life so entirely together she even cuts fruit the right way.
“Lou,” she says, and I look up at her. “It’s just a peach. You need to eat.”
“I can’t,” I say, but I pick up a slice anyway. Nate texted me at seven to say I could keep the house. I know him well enough to know that those dark morning hours after the show were longenough for his guilt to fester—that by daybreak, he’d have been sufficiently ashamed about what he’d done to throw me a bone. But it wasn’t until I read his text—You’re right, you should keep the house. I’ll move out—that I remembered Nate was hardly the start of my problem. There’s no way I can afford to stay here on my own. “I’d rather drown in my stomach acid than face this.”
“Stop that.” I’ve been peeling the fuzzy skin off my peach slice and Mei plucks the whole thing out of my hand, setting it back on the cutting board. “No one’s drowning in their stomach acid. Nate is a monster—we can’t do anything about that. But we can figure out this house thing.”
Mei’s known Nate and me since sophomore year at CU; all three of us lived on the same hall and she was there when I met Nate, when he wrote “Purple Girl,” when we moved to Estes Park and started this life. She’s not only my favorite person, but Goldie’s, too. The person Goldie wishes I was: Mei’s had a full-time job since the day after we graduated, coordinating marketing campaigns at an agency downtown. Her LinkedIn has the wordmanageron it. Shehasa LinkedIn.
I haven’t told Goldie about the breakup yet because I can imagine exactly what she’ll say:If you’d figured out a job by now, you’d be able to support yourself. Now what, Lou?Now what, Lou, indeed.
“The rent is ridiculous,” I tell Mei, licking peach juice off my fingertips and feeling my stomach turn. I look around my beautiful, familiar kitchen: its farmhouse sink below the stained-glass window overlooking the garden; its wide, antique floorboards; the cream-colored Smeg fridge that looks like something out ofa vintage fever dream. The smell of it, like a library: aged wood and filtered sunlight. “We only live here because Nate has stupid money. You know this, Mei. I’m not evenemployed.”
“That can change,” she says. She chopped all her hair off at the start of the summer and it’s this lovely, blunt bob—exactly to her jawbone and shiny as sun on water. My hair’s an unbrushed mess. “Right?”
“Not soon enough.” I look at Mei and cough up the lie. “I haven’t even booked my licensing exam.”
“Okay,” she says evenly. “How long will that take?”
What she doesn’t know—what no one knows but Nate—is that I failed the exam the first time around, back in April. That it’s only offered at certain times of year, and that I have to wait until the fall to retake it. My fear of failing all over again has stopped me cold every time I’ve gone to schedule a date, but I’ll have to. Soon, I’ll have to.
I bite my lip. Through the screen door, I see Joss cross the backyard. “A couple months, minimum?”
Mei follows my gaze, tracking Joss’s movement through the garden. She ducks below the sight line of the back porch, and Mei looks back at me. “And how long can you float the rent here on your own?”
My eyes glaze with tears, turning Mei to watercolor. I can’t believe the mess I’ve allowed myself to make of my life. “A month, if I spend most of my savings. And rent is due Monday.”
If Goldie was here, she’d tell me to move. It’s the logical choice: I can’t afford to stay in this house. But Mei, my angel on earth, my very best friend in the entire world, just reaches for my hand across the table. “I know what this place means to you,”she says. “If you need to stay, pay the rent Monday and then we have a whole month to figure out the next move.”
