Page 111 of Maybe in Another Life

I spring into action. I wheel myself out the front door and down the ramp. He’s getting into the car.

“The key,” I say. “Your key, to the house.”

“It’s on the coffee table,” he says. “With the deed. I signed over the townhouse,” he says, as if it is a secret he has been waiting to tell, like a student excited to tell the teacher he did the extra credit.

“OK,” I say, and then I turn my chair around and head back toward the front door.

“I want her to be OK,” he says. “That’s why I gave her the house.”

“OK, Mark,” I say.

“It’s worth a lot of money,” he says. “The equity in the townhouse, I mean. My parents helped us with the down payment, and I’m giving it to her.”

I turn the chair around. “What do you want me to say, Mark? Do you want a gold medal?”

“I want her to understand that I’m doing everything in my power to make this easier on her. That I care about her. You get it, don’t you?”

“Get what?”

“That love makes you do crazy things, that sometimes you have to do things that seem wrong from the outside but you know are right. I thought you’d understand. Given what Gabby told me happened between you and Michael.”

If I hadn’t just been in a car accident where I almost lost my life, maybe I’d be hurt by something as small as a sentence. If I hadn’t spent the past week learning how to stand up on my own and use a wheelchair, maybe I’d let myself fall for this sort of crap. But Mark has the wrong idea about me. I’m no longer a person willing to pretend the things I’ve done wrong are justifiable because of how they make me feel.

I made a mistake. And that mistake is part of what has led me to this moment. And while I neither regret nor condone what I did, I have learned from it. I have grown since. And I’m different now.

You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again. And I know I’ll never make that mistake again. So I let his words rush past me and off into the wind.

“Just go, Mark,” I tell him. “I’ll let her know the house is hers.”

“I never meant to hurt her.” He opens his car door.

“OK,” I say, and I turn away from him. I roll myself up the ramp. I hear his car leave the street. I’m not going to tell her any of that. She can see the deed to the townhouse on her own and form an opinion about it. I’m not going to try to tell her he didn’t mean to hurt her. That’s absurd and meaningless.

It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. Because regardless of our destiny, we still have to answer for our actions. We make choices, big and small, every day of our lives, and those choices have consequences.

We have to face those consequences head-on, for better or worse. We don’t get to erase them just by saying we didn’t mean to. Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices. I’m starting to think that when we don’t own them, we don’t own ourselves.

I roll back into the house and see Gabby, still lying on the floor, nearly catatonic. She’s staring at the ceiling. Her tears spill from her face and form tiny puddles on the floor.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever felt pain like this,” she says. “And I think I’m still in shock. It’s only going to get worse, right? It’s only going to get deeper and sharper, and it’s already so deep and so sharp.”

For the first time in what feels like a long time, I’m higher up than Gabby. I have to look down to meet her eyeline. “You won’t have to go through it alone,” I tell her. “I’ll be here through every part of it. I’d do anything for you, do you know that? Does it help? To know that I’d move mountains for you? That I’d part seas?”

She looks up at me.

I move one foot onto the ground and lean over. I try to get my hands onto the floor in front of me.

“Hannah, stop,” she says as I push my center of gravity closer to her, trying to lie down next to her. But I don’t have the mechanics right. I don’t have the right strength just yet. I topple over. It hurts. It actually hurts quite a bit. But I have pain medication in my bag and things to do. So I move through it. I scoot next to her, pushing the wheelchair out of the way.

“I love you,” I tell her. “And I believe in you. I believe in Gabby Hudson. I believe she can do anything.”

She looks at me with gratitude, and then she keeps crying. “I’m so embarrassed,” she says between breaths. She’s about to start hyperventilating.

“Shhh. There’s no reason to be embarrassed. I can’t go to the bathroom on my own. So you have no right to claim embarrassment,” I tell her.

She laughs, if only for the smallest, infinitesimal second, and then she starts crying again. To hear it makes my heart ache.

“Squeeze my hand,” I tell her as I take her hand in mine. “When it hurts so bad you don’t think you can stand it, squeeze my hand.”

---