Everything After(70)
Emily stood. “Want some more coffee?” she asked.
He nodded and she walked over to fill two mugs with one of the one-cup machines.
As she was walking back to him, his phone rang. “It’s my girls on FaceTime,” he said. “Would you mind staying out of the frame?”
Emily put his mug on the end table next to the couch and walked, with her own mug, back to her room.
“Well hello there, lovely ladies!” she heard him say as she closed the door.
She missed Ezra. She missed Ari. Maybe she could jump on FaceTime with her sister. Coffee in hand, she walked over to her night table and found her phone there. Ezra had written back to her text: I read your journal. There aren’t enough words.
Emily stared at what he’d written. What did he mean? Enough words for what? Enough words to speak to her again?
Her coffee churned in her stomach and she walked out onto the hotel’s balcony to will the feeling away.
She dialed on her phone.
“Hello?”
“Priya?” Emily responded.
Priya’s voice came through, warm and clear. “Hey there. How’s your Mexican getaway? Are you and Ezra back on track?”
“Not really,” Emily said. “It’s . . . kind of a mess.” The waves crashed in front of her, cresting and falling. “I’m here with Rob, actually. But not romantically. We’re sleeping in different bedrooms.”
“Whoa,” Priya said. “Well. I can do the thing where I pretend to be a normal person and support you even if you’re doing something problematic. Or we can really talk.”
Emily laughed softly. “I think I might be beyond the normal-person response now. I feel like I keep making stupid decisions even though I know they’re stupid. I convince myself they’re right, that they’re the thing I’m meant to do, but in my heart I know they’re complicating everything even more.”
“What do you mean?” Priya asked.
“I think . . .” Emily thought about it; she thought about her life as if it were someone else’s. “I think Ezra disappointed me so deeply when he wasn’t there after our miscarriage that I keep testing the boundaries of his love for me. Kind of like—will you still love me if I do this? Or that? If I fly to Mexico? If I become a musician? If I show you all of the really messed-up parts of myself? I feel like I want him to prove to me that he loves me anyway, and he keeps showing me the opposite. So I push harder. I love him, but I think I’m afraid he doesn’t love me—he loves a particular version of me, but when things get tough he runs. What if he doesn’t come back?”
Priya cleared her throat on the other end of the line. “I could see how what you’ve been doing falls into that paradigm. And I think it’s quite possible that you’re doing some of this as a reaction to Ezra, but it seems to me that some of this is about your own happiness. For the last few months, you haven’t seemed happy at work—I really realized it when you were talking about being a sin eater. I was going to talk to you, but then you had the miscarriage and it didn’t seem the right time. Anyway, now you were given a chance to do something you used to love, so you went. You could’ve stayed, but you chose to leave, to go to Mexico and see if your dream was there. It’s not all about Ezra.”
Emily sat down in a little chair that had been placed on her balcony. “My mom always used to say that everything turns out the way it’s supposed to, that the decisions you make are the ones you were supposed to make.”
“Huh,” Priya said. “So we think we have free will, but we don’t?”
The sun shone down and Emily lifted up her face to feel the rays on her skin. “Yeah, that’s what she thought. I’ve been using that as an excuse, though, I think. For years. I think I have to take responsibility for what I’ve done.”
“Oh, Em.” Priya’s voice was full of sympathy. “I wish I were there to give you a hug right now.”
“Me too,” Emily said.
“Listen,” Priya told her, “you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Things are starting to come clear. I have faith in you. You’ll figure it all out. You’ll find a way to be happy.”
“Thank you,” Emily answered. “That means a lot. No matter what, I’ll see you soon.”
Emily sat in her room and worked on her song, pulling up a piano keyboard app on her phone to figure out the accompaniment until Rob knocked on her door.
“Hungry?” he asked. “It’s way past lunchtime.”
Emily nodded, and the two of them headed down to the beachside restaurant. They recaptured a bit of the fun they’d had the day before, laughing and smiling together, but it felt like an echo of yesterday.
“You still want to play tonight?” he asked as they were finishing up.
“If you’ll still have me,” she said.
He laughed. “Queenie,” he said. “When will you realize that I’ll always still have you?”
He stood up and reached out his hand for her. She took it and the two of them walked back to the villa to get ready for the show.
59
Emily watched again from the wings. Rob was still objectively fantastic, but there was something missing from this show, like he’d been slightly wrung out. If you didn’t know him, you wouldn’t expect anything else, but since she did, she could see it. Diana did, too.