The Comeback(25)
“Will do.”
I watch him walk down the porch without turning back. You could write a symphony with our silences.
* * *
? ? ?
When the end came, it was so quiet it was deafening. It was a cool morning last November, only a couple of days after my final movie, Lights of Berlin, was released. I was sitting on the balcony outside our bedroom, smoking a cigarette and watching the choppy water crash against the coastline as the sky lightened. I wore a knitted sweater and plaid pajama bottoms, and I had the unfair clarity of someone who hasn’t been to sleep yet, mainly because I’d just got back from a party where I was sprinkling Molly into my own drink like it was sugar.
Dylan woke up and found me on the balcony, the tension already marked across his face and in his shoulders. I figured that someone had told him what I’d been doing, even though he wouldn’t allude to it directly. He never did and I never apologized. I would just read it in his face, and everything he didn’t say. This time, though, he sat next to me and lit his own cigarette, and then he turned to ask me something he never had before.
“Why do we find it so hard to be happy?”
It’s me, I wanted to tell him, but some things are too obvious to say. It was one of those days, weeks, months when I felt the world too strongly. My skin had been peeled away, my chest cracked open, and I was exposed to everything around me in high-definition, 3-D surround sound. The sight of an old man eating ice cream alone or an unhappy silence between a couple I didn’t even know would settle somewhere deep within me. The sound of a car horn or siren two blocks away would leave me shaking, and I’d mistake every piece of trash on the floor for a dead animal, my brain contorting and playing tricks on me, just like Able always said it did. Each moment would claim another inch of my mind until, bit by bit, it wasn’t my own anymore. I was strung out and so tired of feeling too much that I guess at some point it just became easier to not feel anything at all.
I looked out to the point where the charcoal morning sky met the ocean, and that was when I decided to tell Dylan what it was I had been trying to drown out all this time. What everything always led back to. For the first time in my life, I had realized with perfect clarity that I was fucking something up before it was too late, and I even knew the way out.
“I need to tell you something,” I started, and my throat was thick and tight, as if my body still wasn’t ready to say the words I’d never said out loud. Dylan waited.
“When I first got to LA, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was by myself and things happened that I don’t think should have happened, and I want to believe it wasn’t my fault, but I’m too close to it. I don’t know if I will ever be able to explain it, even to you, but I know that I want to try, and maybe that’s enough for right now.”
The sentences were coming out as heavy fragments, but I knew that Dylan could tell it was important from the way he froze next to me. I wrapped my arms around myself and allowed myself to look at him just once more before I started again. I wanted to see the openness on his face, the way his bronze eyes softened when they were focused on me, but instead I saw something unexpected. Dylan, who was supposed to love me more than anything in the world, whom I needed to love me unquestioningly, especially when I didn’t deserve it, wanted me to stop talking. He wanted me to save him from the burden of knowing the truth.
“Grace. I can’t . . .” He didn’t finish but I understood perfectly because he looked exactly how I felt. He didn’t want to know because he wanted my story only to be his story, two lonely teenagers who fell in love in the weirdest city in the world and managed to make it work. He didn’t want to hear about the story before him, the thing that clung to my back whenever I left the house, or that sat on my chest whenever I tried to sleep.
My heart split into millions of pieces.
When I could speak again, I changed the subject, and we spoke about where we would go on vacation next. Dylan talked about sleeping under the stars in Holbox, just like he used to on camping trips when he was a kid. I already knew that I was leaving, and maybe Dylan did, too, because his words carried an unusual force that morning, as if he were trying to pin me down with them.
The thing was, I could see with uncharacteristic clarity what would happen if I stayed. I would hurt him over and over again until neither of us could look at the other, and this time it would be irrefutably, unforgivably on purpose.
We got into bed soon after that, and Dylan fell straight back to sleep with a slight smile on his lips, the way he always did, and I curled into his back, breathing in his sandalwood smell. After he left for work, I took six Percocets and then curled up in a ball on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor, sobbing like I hadn’t since I was a baby. When the world around me finally started to fray at the edges, drifting out of reach, I called Laurel, who arranged for an unmarked ambulance to rush me to the emergency room for treatment.
Two days later, I was back in Anaheim.
Nobody ever thought to ask me why I’d done it.
* * *
? ? ?
The rental feels quiet once Dylan has left. I push the thought of him out of my mind in exactly the same way I have for the past year, and I start to unpack the boxes. I didn’t know what was officially mine and what was Dylan’s, or what he would notice or miss, or think of me when he didn’t see, so I brought only clothes with me, even though I’ve been wearing the same slip dress with college sweaters since I’ve been back in LA. Wren told me that she’s already spotted three women wearing the same outfit in Venice. Maybe they hate the sight of their own skin too.