Page 45 of Anywhere with You
“But I am grateful. I don’t think I would’ve gone alone.”
“Why not?” I looked at her, beautiful dark hair whipping around in the breeze.
“I don’t think that I ever learned how to do things alone. How tobealone. I relationship-hopped through college, and by the time I graduated, I was with Lorenzo. I lived with college roommates, then with him, and this is the first time I’ve ever been by myself long enough to rearrange the furniture.” She huffed a laugh. “And then I immediately came to see if you would go with me, so I didn’t have to stay alone in my apartment or go alone on the road. I just couldn’t take nine days with my own thoughts. How pathetic is that?”
I wanted to hug her, but I settled for poking her in the cheek.
“Ow,” she protested.
“So you haven’t been alone because you’ve always had people around who love you? That’s not pathetic. That’s sort of ideal human existence. Sure, rearrange your furniture. Sure, make time for what you want. But the goal of all this isn’t some mythical independence. Didn’t you ever read that dude who said no man is an island? Tolstoy?”
“John Donne.”
“Right. I mean, romance isn’t the goal. Or sex. I know you’re a biologist, but sex isn’t the whole point. I mean, it’s pretty good. Really good. Great, sometimes. But it can’t be the whole point.”
“So what is?”
“It’s us.” I hurried to add, “It’s all of us. Friendships and family and community and all that crap. And joy and wonder. It’s sitting in front of the Grand Canyon and actually thinking about who we are and what we want.”
Cara stared at me. “That’s pretty deep, Honeybee.”
“I’d be perfectly happy if you never called me that again,” I said, and she laughed.
“So, what do you want,Honey?”
I shrugged. “I got what I wanted. I wanted a music shop and a wife and to not have to worry too much about the electric bill.”
“Is that still what you want?”
I stretched out my legs onto the warm rock and leaned over to dust off my guitar tattoo. “Three months ago, I would’ve said yes without hesitation. It’s everything that I worked for, and I was happy. But now I have to wonder, was I? Am I? Because all of a sudden there’s this great gaping hole.” I gestured to the Grand Canyon with a snorting laugh, and Cara humored my pathetic joke with a grin. “Was it always there? I feel like I’ve made the big changes that I meant to make in my life and neglected the little ones.”
Cara was nodding. “I feel like maybe I’ve done the opposite, that I filled up my life with little things that improve my day without considering the massive things that made me unhappy.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. So what do we do now?”
“I have no idea.”
After a time, Cara asked softly, “Do you still love her?”
I took a deep breath before I answered, trying to put words to something that up to now, I’d only felt. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s like I should be able to stop all at once, but that’s harder than it sounds. I kind of…I kind of don’t want my life going forward to be about missing her or hating her. I don’t even want this week to be about that. My life is bigger than her, and it always has been.” I stopped, pressing my palms into the warm rock.
Cara listened intently, not rushing to fill the silences. I liked that about her, I realized, but her silence drew words out of me like no one I’d ever met. I’d barely even spoken to my parents about Bridget, past saying that she was an ugly cheater and her nose was unnaturally small, a fact that I had carried in silence for years, and that I never wanted to talk about her again. They respected that, but maybe they shouldn’t have. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Maybe I should’ve had a real conversation with the people who loved me most in the world.
“What about you?” I asked.
Cara shook her head. “Oh, I definitely don’t love Bridget.”
I pushed her to the side, and she laughed, straightening. But in the seconds that followed, her face grew serious, then sad.
“I just wanted to save our marriage,” she said. “That was my whole goal. I couldn’t stand the thought of telling our families that it was over. I would wake up at night in a complete panic, and he would pretend to still be sleeping.” She cringed, then went on, “I used to wonder all the time, what if he was someone else, Enrique or someone I’d see at the gym, and I’d imagine this whole other life for myself, and since I was imagining, I could make it be…more, be better than what I had. After a while, I never wanted to come back to reality. I think…” She took a full breath in and out. “I think that I stopped loving Lorenzo a long time ago.”
“You were really unhappy,” I said, a little surprised. Had Bridget been that unhappy? It wouldn’t excuse her being a lying, cheating bag of trash, but maybe I should’ve wondered, before now, if that was part of the reason she turned to Lorenzo. Maybe our marriage had already been failing.
“Yes. But I don’t think I realized it, or I didn’t let myself think those actual words. I would’ve done anything to save my marriage.Anything. And that was the focus of all my thoughts and all my energy, until…until his bags were packed. He left the apartment key on the counter, and when he was gone, I sat there and held it. I had never felt so powerless.”
“And now?”
