Do I Know You?(80)

“Have a nice trip home,” Lindsey manages when they get inside, not quite meeting David’s eyes. David mutters something I can’t hear in reply.

My heart sinks for my friend. While I haven’t known David long, not only was I really rooting for him—I’d started to find in his hope the hope I needed myself. It’s difficult not to see in this obviously dismal turn of events one more sign from the universe that things weren’t going to turn out well. Not for me, nor for my large-hearted new confidant.

Only once Lindsey has disappeared into the back does David notice me. His somber expression unchanging, he walks up to me with his hands in his pockets. I wait, expecting the full rundown. If I know David, he’s going to need to give me a detailed report, to strategize, to figure out and fix what went wrong. He’s going to need hope.

Instead, he only sighs.

“I need a drink,” he says.





49


    Eliza


I WALK MY luggage from my room to the car, moving methodically, with empty calm. The car is parked in the small lot where we first drove in, and I can’t help feeling the finality of my every step, each one carrying me closer to saying goodbye to the chances I once found here.

The night is shifting from twilight blue into black over the trees surrounding the hotel. I load the suitcase into our trunk, remembering how frayed my wits were when I got out of this car six days ago. How hopeless I felt.

Miserable, I shut the door. I really don’t know what to do. Marriages, I think, run on the conviction of having a certain invincibility. To make the promises they involve, you have to believe you could, if called upon, do whatever your spouse needs. It’s a faith you need to keep.

But it’s a perilous one, isn’t it? If Graham needed me to compute multivariable calculus right now, I couldn’t do it—no matter the promises I made to him on the lawn of the Huntington Gardens.

What if this is emotional multivariable calculus?

I’m confronting the possibility that Graham needs something from me I don’t know how to give. Leaning against the car, I stare at the hotel. I don’t want to go to the bar to meet him just yet, not when it puts me one pace closer to embarking on the journey home. Leaving here doesn’t just mean leaving the celebration of our anniversary, leaving the progress we made. It means leaving the performance behind—its joys, its surprises, its memories.

So I say goodbye. Under the night sky, I pause in silent farewell to my character, the vacation planner who helped me to loosen up around my husband, who could see Graham in so many new lights.

The feeling isn’t entirely new. Whenever I finish a job, I mourn just a little the small death of the character I played. This is worse, though. This other Eliza brought so much to my life. I’m going to miss her, and her fling with a man she was already falling for, and her business with her three sisters.

My heart clenches painfully, tears catching me by surprise for the second time in one day. I open the passenger door and get inside, then pop open the glove compartment, searching for napkins. The tearful feeling doesn’t pass, my throat throbbing painfully. I’m upset about Graham, of course, about how I guess I failed him in some way I couldn’t see coming today.

But I’m crying about Michelle, too. About how childishly transparent it was that I invented this perfect little professional life for my character with her merry group of vacation-planning sisters, like we’re some upbeat Netflix comedy. What a joke. What a fucking sad joke.

Returning to the real Eliza means fully dealing with everything going on with my sister, not just escaping into this fantasy version of myself. The tears come harder now. In the echoing quiet of the car, I hear myself gulping sobs while everything crashes over me.

How did I let things get so messed up with my sister? Yes, Michelle shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that I missed her engagement party because I was flippant or selfish, but I didn’t explain myself, either. I didn’t try. Not once. Maybe Graham was right when he said I don’t make it easy to know me. Maybe I hide from problems, preferring to ignore them until the point where they become daunting, impossible, consuming.

How do I stop, though? Somehow, I need to open the door not just to Graham, but to Michelle, too. Because—I realize with panicky hurt so profound it makes me crumple over the dashboard—they’re just different parts of the same problem. In my battered heart, I know feeling rejected and judged by Michelle is why I’ve been closed off with Graham these past months. I was scared. If my only sister, once my best friend in the whole world, could write me off, then the man I loved could, too.

But not if I wrote us off first.

It’s why, this whole trip, I’ve resisted getting into anything real with Graham. I didn’t want to be in the position to get rejected the way Michelle rejected me.

But that ends now, I hear in my head in a firm voice I don’t entirely recognize. I need to open the door to them and face what could hurt me. Pushing myself not to lose my nerve, I unlock my phone, and with unsteady hands, I call Michelle. In the seconds while the call rings, I compose myself, casting off my tears with deep breaths.

My sister picks up, her voice prickly. “Hello?”

I don’t hesitate. “I didn’t mean to miss your engagement party. I promise—I tried to get out of the studio but it wasn’t just my job that would have been affected by cutting out early. I couldn’t do it to the producer, the sound technicians, the people who needed my work done. Then when I could get out, I spent forever on the phone with the airline searching for whatever wild connecting flights would get me there in time, but there just was nothing. Truly there wasn’t,” I say, pausing only to catch my breath. “I’m so, so sorry. I wanted to be there more than anything. I still have the toast I wrote in my phone. I know it looked flaky or selfish of me to miss it, I know that. But . . . Michelle, it really fucking hurt that you didn’t even ask me what had happened. You just assumed I was making it about me.”