Halfway to You(77)

“I wanted to tell you. At the airport, last April.”

My laugh was mocking. “But you didn’t.”

“You cut me off.”

“You could’ve gone on. You could’ve had the balls to—”

“Don’t lecture me about opportunities,” Todd hissed, “when you decided to confront me about this over the phone, a million miles away.”

“I was humiliated,” I said. “And hurt. That hurt, hearing about her from near strangers.”

“You could’ve asked,” he said, but the words were half-hearted. He knew this was not my responsibility, not entirely.

“I assumed you were telling me the full truth to begin with—which apparently was a mistake.” Maybe it was my fault he didn’t feel comfortable enough to open up to me. But he had told me half the story—why he’d left out the most important detail didn’t make sense to me.

“I’m guessing Keith didn’t get this heat from you?” He was no longer caught off guard; he was angry.

“Keith and I aren’t lovers,” I shouted. “We aren’t talking about uprooting our lives to move in together.”

I looked out the window, to where the tree branches were rattling against each other. A single, skeletal leaf—dead but still clinging—quivered in the breeze, silver as a coin.

“Do you even trust me, Todd?” I asked. “Because every few months I feel like I’m meeting you all over again. How can we ever expect to make things work—to have intimacy—when you’re not willing to open up to me?” I thought about Venice, and Greece, and New York—all the times Todd could’ve opened up but didn’t. “Will you ever love me as much as you loved her?”

“Jesus, Ann, what kind of question is that?”

“You’re asking me to move halfway across the world for you,” I said. “You’re asking me to give up my entire way of life. But you haven’t been honest with me. You haven’t been open with me. How can you ask so much when you offer so little?”

“So little?” Todd fumed. “My grief aside, when have I ever held you at arm’s length? We’ve written letters, I’ve spent thousands of dollars flying to Rome for you, I’ve neglected my business for you. What more can I do to prove to you that I love you?”

I was shaking so hard the phone rattled against my jaw. I squeezed the comforter with my other hand, trying to steady myself against the words I knew were coming next.

“If you can’t see that,” Todd said slowly, “if you can’t appreciate all that I have done, then maybe this isn’t working.”

Every part of my being was screaming to speak in that moment, but my tongue didn’t work. My jaw wouldn’t cooperate.

“Maybe we should take a break from whatever this is,” Todd said. “To figure out what we both want.”

Suddenly, the distance between us felt massive. The things that divided us were rocky and treacherous. I couldn’t see a path around them. I couldn’t see how Todd and I could work—not now, not when he wanted a quiet suburban life in Colorado and I wanted anything but. We were standing on opposite sides of a ravine, wondering if the trek was truly worth the risks and the miles in the end.

I didn’t have words for this feeling; I was out of breath from the climbing I’d already endured.

Todd waited a long time, and then the phone line clicked, and he was gone.





ANN


Various Locations

February 1994–August 1995

Over a year passed in which I spent very little time in the home I had fought so hard to defend on the phone with Todd. He lingered in every corner of Trastevere: a shadow on the Ponte Sisto, an empty seat across from mine at Carmella’s, a spare pillow on my bed. I was hurting, so I did what I always did when I hurt: I ran.

I took every travel-article assignment offered to me. I visited pyramids and mosques, lochs and ruins. The Taj Mahal and the Great Wall. I have photos of myself on three different continents, places I don’t quite remember. In the photos, I look thin and worn.

You’re a tourist, Todd had said. He was right.

It’s just that I wanted so badly to rewrite my story without Todd’s name showing up on so many of my inner pages.





MAGGIE


San Juan Island, Washington State, USA Thursday, January 11, 2024

Maggie can relate.

It’s something she and Ann have in common. Open one of them up, and Todd is scrawled across the inside in permanent ink. It’s comforting to Maggie to know she’s not the only person who has been rewritten by Todd Langley.

“It’s late,” Maggie observes.

Beyond Ann’s windows, the clouds and the ocean are equal shades of dim, ethereal gray blue. The skeletal trees and bluff grasses are mere shapes in the odd twilight, like block prints stamped in black ink; they bleed around the edges, shadows expanding. Inside, the honey yellow of the kitchen’s overhead lights is a different season altogether.

“Stay,” Ann says, not a command but an urging. “We have a lot of catching up to do, and I know Grant is breathing down your neck. I can order takeout, if you’re hungry.”

“All right.” Maggie switches off the recorder and follows Ann into the kitchen.