Page 103 of What's in a Kiss?

The card is dated three months ago.After three months, most women’s bodies are ready to conceive again. I pull out the only other thing left in the drawer. It’s an opened box—an ovulation kit. Jake and I are about to try again. We’re going to try to have a baby. This thought sends a beautiful shock wave of warmth through my body—even as my brain is flashingCaution...

Every cell inside me wants to make a family with this man.

But not like this. I can’t do it here, because one day my child will want me to tell them stories of how their dad and I fell in love. And I won’t have the answers, because I wasn’t there. Because I don’t belong.

I’ve been faking it as Jake’s wife all week, but you can’t fake motherhood. I can’t get pregnant here. I cannot have a child. And I can’t stay here andnothave a baby, depriving Jake of the family he wants. It tears me apart to face that this, finally, is it.

I take a beach towel from the linen closet, find my key fob for the Lucid. I kiss Gram Parsons goodbye and walk to thegarage. It’s five o’clock on a sunny Saturday in April. I’ve been in the High Life for a week. The sun sits high in the sky, a little west of center. I feel it guiding me, tugging me along. If I leave now, if I follow the sun, I can meet Jake at Zuma in about an hour. We can surf, we can talk, we can watch the sun go down. He won’t know it, but that will be goodbye.

I’m crying by the time I reach the bottom of our driveway. There’s a woman there, putting her key into my Real Life mailbox. I recognize her as the birthday cake burglar. She’s wearing sweatpants, flip-flops, her hair in a topknot. Thumbing a stack of bills, she looks lost in the thick of her life’s own struggles. She looks a lot like I used to look when I lived there. I wipe my eyes and roll down my window.

“Hi,” I say. “I’m your neighbor. Olivia.”

“Sarah,” she says and smiles. “Crazy how we all live on top of each other here, but we never see each other.” She looks at me. “Wait, Olivia Dusk? FromZombie Hospital?”

“That’s the one.”

“I was just watching your show while I folded laundry. Like, your face is literally frozen on my laptop. LA’s so crazy, right?”

“You know what’s even crazier? I used to live in your house.”

“Really?” She laughs. “Wait, you’re not the photographer who only took shots of nudes in bathtubs?”

“I think I lived there... before that. Or something.” I put the car in Park. “Can I... come inside for a minute, to see what you’ve done to the place?”

“Totally,” she says and waves me in.

I mount the three steps to the little front porch, hearing their familiar creak. Sarah’s stained them, but in another world,they’re a garish green I’ve always kind of loved. I run my hand along the banister, knowing where its rough places are. Homesickness washes over me, and I wonder if I’ll ever feel at home again, if I’ll always feel stuck between lives, between realities, no matter what happens, where I go, what I choose. I’ve glimpsed a world I can’t un-glimpse. I’ve felt a love I can’t un-feel. Now I must un-stay. I know what I have to do, and I can’t not do it.

The front door still sticks. I step over the threshold, and even though she’s got incense burning, underneath it I smell the familiar scent of the house, woodsy with a whiff of jasmine. I walk through the rooms, touching the wall where my bookshelf used to be, where I’d once stored the rainbow color-coded stories of my life. I walk into the kitchen, where through the open window, you can still reach out and pluck the herbs that grow at eye-level on the ground. I touch the cool, damp soil.

I was here. I’ll be here again. I want to take comfort in this, but it makes me want to cry.

“What do you think?” Sarah asks. “Is it weird to be back?”

“I like what you’ve done,” I say even as the details of her changes disappear. On some level, I’m aware the furniture’s different, and the paint and the curtains, but none of that is registering now. None of it matters. What I’m experiencing is a woman’s life in this home. It’s a little hardscrabble, a little glamorous, a lot cobbled together with love and optimism, with rejection and doubt and pain. Just like it was for me.

I remember everything about my life when I was here, and I want it back. I want to stand on the solid ground of the choicesI made. I want to feel them in my bones when I lie down in bed, when I sit outside at my table and look up at the two stars visible in the LA sky.

But I want Jake with me, too.

“This place is quirky as fuck, but I love it,” Sarah says. “Wanna see the back?”

I follow her outside, where days ago I attempted to primp for Masha’s wedding on this very lawn. That life—that me—feels so close, and so uncannily out of reach.

“You put in a projector,” I say, studying the machine mounted under her roof’s eave. “I always wanted to do that.”

“My boyfriend housed it in this weatherproof casing,” Sarah says proudly. Then she pauses, her features hitching a little with anxiety. “I know the bedrock is technically yours—”

“Those flickering images are mine!” I joke.

Sarah laughs.

“No, it’s cool,” I say. “That’s how it should be used.”

“You should come down some Friday, if you want. We have a movie club. We’re going through every Gwyneth Paltrow movie. This week isSliding Doors.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

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