All the Dangerous Things(11)

Not anymore, though. Now, whenever I see him, I taste something metallic. Like sucking on pennies or licking a fresh wound, tasting blood on my tongue. It’s like my body is refusing to let me forget how deeply he hurt me. When he looks at me with those gentle eyes, soft and sweet like two dollops of whipped cream, I don’t melt the way I used to.

Instead, I harden.

“Losing a child is one of the most trying things a couple can go through,” Dr. Harris had said the first time I showed up to our appointment alone. I didn’t have to say anything; somehow, he just knew. Maybe he saw it coming. “Some make it out stronger, but most don’t make it out at all.”

I had wanted to fall into the category of some. Really, I did. Not even to make it out stronger—just to make it out alive. But that’s the thing about grief: There is no manual for it. There is no checklist outlining the optimal way to move through it and move on. Ben, always the realist, simply bowed his head and swam against the current. From day one, he leaned on statistics and facts, adjusting the probability of Mason’s return every single day until, finally, he decided it was time to stop swimming. We had lost the race, and it was time to admit defeat. It was time to rest. I knew it was painful for him. I knew it hurt. I knew it took everything in him to keep himself moving forward—and even more to force himself to stop—but I couldn’t even keep my head above water. From the very beginning, I was dragging him down, drowning him with me, and when he realized he couldn’t save us both, he decided to save himself.

Turns out, we were wedged firmly in with most.

I find myself wondering now if most at least make it a year, because we certainly didn’t. We barely even made it six months.

We didn’t have the most traditional courtship, Ben and I, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that a relationship that started out with the speed and electricity of lightning disappeared just as fast—but still. We shared seven years together. Seven.

That’s something.

I can’t help but think back on it now, the moment we first met. It felt like fate, honestly; the collision, quite literally, of two people who were just meant to be together. At the time, it reminded me of the stars: how two can collide and fuse into one—bigger, brighter, stronger than before. But what I didn’t know then was that when they collide too fast, they don’t fuse at all. Instead, they explode, evaporating into nothing.

I had just moved to Savannah back then, three years out of college and my barely furnished studio apartment just blocks from my new office at The Grit. I don’t even remember the exact moment I decided I wanted to be a writer for The Grit; it was just something I had always known, the same way doctors and firefighters carry their childhood dreams over into adulthood, cupping them so tightly they forget to look up and notice what else could possibly be out there. What else exists.

Some of my best memories involve lying on the floor of my parents’ living room, Margaret and I, belly-side down on a rust-red oriental. Our skinny legs would kick in the air as Margaret flipped through the glossy pages, pointing at her favorite pictures. Tell me a story, she’d croon, and I would read the accompanying article out loud for her, sounding out every word. It was the kind of magazine people noticed in airports and grocery stores, with a thick matte cover and expensive-looking paper; the kind of magazine people kept as a coffee-table decoration—people like my parents—its mere existence so perfectly mirroring the type of image they aspired to uphold: sophisticated, cultured, well-to-do.

Their tagline, so impeccably succinct: The Grit Tells the Stories of the South.

I moved at the end of October, a week before my first day. I remember thinking that all these Southern cities are always a bit of the same, with their giant live oaks and Spanish moss and wrought-iron gates crawling with star jasmine—but at the same time, all a bit different, too. Unique in their own right. Savannah reminded me of home, but only the good parts, as if the squishy bruises had been extracted with a switchblade, leaving nothing but ripe possibility. And I was loving it, I really was, but five whole days of solitude—of not recognizing a single face, uttering a single word—can get a little lonely, so by that weekend, I had decided to get dressed up and venture out on my own.

I remember ambling up to a little spot by the Savannah River, my hands punched into my pockets and the smell of smoke and jalape?os making my nostrils flare. Then I walked up to the outdoor bar, my breath coming out in puffs.

“Fifteen dollars for all you can eat,” the bartender had said. He smelled like salt water and marsh mud and the sour traces of warm, spilt beer. “Comes with a shucker and towel.”

I fished out my wallet and handed him a twenty, exchanging the cash for a Blue Moon, a little knife, and a bucket full of oysters steamed over a grate of hot coals—but once I swung around, I immediately knocked into the man behind me, sending my beer flying.

“I am so sorry,” I said, trying to stop the rest of it from sloshing down my wrist. I looked at his jacket, at the frothy liquid dripping down his chest. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you—”

The man looked down at his jacket, soaking, and wiped the excess off with his gloves. Then he looked back at me, took in my face, and smiled, the corner of his lip pulling up gently until I got a glimpse of his teeth.

“It’s fine, no worries,” he said. “At least you didn’t hit me with that.” He pointed to the knife wedged between my fingers, the blade sticking straight out. “Shanked by an oyster shucker. Not a pleasant way to go.”