Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(17)

Paul was right: we were too young to be making such a major life decision. And while I may have been too foolish to know better, somewhere in his soul, Tom must have—he just must have—known he would one day betray me with his truth, and yet he went and married me anyway. I’ll be honest: when I thought about this, I literally wanted to kill him, in the most grammatically accurate rendition of the phrase.

I flipped through a few pages of the album before pausing at a photo of Tom and me standing in the middle of a busy downtown street. We were on a strip of raised concrete that divided one direction of traffic from the other, but with my wedding dress spread out over the cement, it looked like we were parting the cars. Tom had tipped me backward to kiss me; just behind my head, a bus, blurred by distance and speed, charged toward us. When I saw the shot after the wedding, I thought it was cute. Cute! Like, Look, my marriage is so strong that this two-ton city bus can’t shatter it!

That girl, who couldn’t identify a metaphor if it ran her over? Who believed her future held a house full of laughing children and a husband who would love her for the rest of her life?

I didn’t know her anymore. I wondered if I ever really had.





TEN


After my mother died, I wanted to die, too. I don’t often think about that time; mostly I pretend it never happened. Our family has almost no photos from the year that followed the funeral, but the few that exist reveal an uncomfortably overweight girl with short, self-shorn hair; her brother, who, while thin and hauntingly beautiful, was every bit as uneasy in his skin; her father, a bereft middle-aged man with a lightning strike of gray running through his curls; and a shadow where a wife and mother should have been standing beside them. You can see why I don’t like to reminisce.

In the end, I recovered, as did Paul, and we did it by hiding away from the world—ditching our friends, dropping activities we’d once excelled at, doing the bare minimum in school, burying our noses in novels, and cultivating a disturbing appreciation for horror flicks (which appalled our father, who nonetheless handed over his Blockbuster card because he worried that saying no would cause even more trauma to our fragile psyches). What little we spoke was to each other or Dad; slasher films aside, we wanted to protect him as much as we motherless pubescent humans were able, and ignoring him would have had the opposite effect.

This is all to say that isolation worked, so it’s not terribly surprising that after my adult life fell apart in the span of a few short hours and continued to crumble in the days that followed, my instinct was to re-create the people-less bubble that once brought me peace. I needed to get to a better place so I could live like I was dying. Which is surprisingly difficult to do if you are in fact dying, as opposed to, say, singing along to some canned song written by a guy who has never had anything more serious than the stomach flu, or reading a fridge magnet to remind yourself that if this were your last day on the planet, you would have a tub of Cool Whip for dinner—dessert first and all that—then go line-dancing with your friends.

I didn’t want to sing. I didn’t want to gorge myself on imitation dairy or put on cowboy boots. But if I could just ignore the world for a month or two, I was confident that I would eventually be able to fully immerse myself in life’s little pleasures while I still had a life left to live.



If the voice mails I received in the thirty-six hours following the Death and Divorce Sale were any indication, solitude was a tall order.

PAUL: “You know I don’t like it when I don’t hear from you every day. Call me or I’m going to send a diving crew into the Chicago River to look for you.”

DAD: “Paul told me about Tom. I’m so sorry, honey. I love you. Call me when you get a chance.”

JACKIE: “Libby, you cow! Come back before I send a messenger to drag you here by the hair. The holiday ads will kill me if I don’t have an assistant, so stop sulking and get your bovine butt in the office. Now!”

PAUL: “Libs? Knock it off and call me.”

PAUL: “Libs. Today.”

RANDOM MEDICAL RECEPTIONIST: “This call is for Elizabeth Miller. Elizabeth, Dr. S—” (Delete.) JACKIE: “Libby, this is not amusing. Get your dimpled a—” (Delete.) PAUL: “Regret to inform you that if you do not pick up your phone soon, I will be forced to get on a plane and come find you. Although that would require getting in a large hunk of metal and catapulting myself into the air at the mercy of a plebeian who makes a mere hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars a year to operate said metal, and as you are well aware, I’d rather wax my sac than do that. So call me, okay?”

JACKIE: “I spoke with HR. There’s an extra fifteen thousand in it for you—” (Delete.) RAJ: “The listing’s live and I’ve already had a few inquiries. I can start showing as soon as you’re ready. Talk soon.”

TOM: “Um.” (It sounded like he dropped the phone.)

TOM: “Me again. Are you okay? Can you please call me?”

DAD: “It’s me again, Libby Lou. Please call me when you can.”



I texted Paul a photo of the empty apartment as proof of life, then hopped up on the kitchen counter and called my father back.

He sounded like he was trying not to sound tired. “Hey, kiddo. Paul told me about you and Tom. I’m . . . I’m just really sorry. You deserve better.”