One True Loves(22)

I heard my dad and sister enter the house and start looking around for me. I heard, “Emma?” coming from them in every room of the house. I recognized the worry as it grew in their voices, as each time they said my name they were met with more silence. Soon, my mom came home and her voice joined the chorus.

But I couldn’t respond. I had to stand there and watch for Jesse. It was my duty, as his wife. I had to be the first to spot him when he made landfall.

When I noticed someone coming up to the roof, I assumed it was my dad and I thought, Good, he can look, too.

But it was Marie.

She stood there, looking at me, as I held the binoculars up to my face and stared at the ocean.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“What are you doing?” she said as she started walking toward me.

“I’m going to find him.”

I felt Marie put her arm around my shoulder. “You can’t . . . that won’t . . . work,” she said.

“I have to be looking for him. I can’t give up on him.”

“Em, give me the binoculars.”

I wanted to ignore her, but I needed to explain my logic. “Jesse could come back. We have to be watching.”

“He isn’t coming back.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“You just can’t stand that I’m no longer in your shadow,” I said to her. “Because it means you aren’t the center of the world anymore. Jesse is coming back, Marie. And I am going to sit here and wait until he does. Because I know my husband. I know how incredible he is. And I’m not going to allow you to make me feel like he’s anything less just because you like it better when I feel small.”

Marie reared her head back, as though I’d struck her.

“I have to stay here and watch for him. It’s my job. As his wife.”

When I saw the look on my sister’s face in that moment, a mixture of compassion and fear, I realized that she thought I was crazy.

For a moment, I wondered, Oh, my God. Am I crazy?

“Emma, I’m so sorry,” she said as she put her arms around me and held me the way a mother holds a child, as if we were of the same body. I was not used to that type of sister, the type of sister that is also a friend. I was used to having just a sister, the way some of your teachers are just teachers and some of your coworkers are just coworkers. “Jesse is dead,” she told me. “He’s not out there somewhere trying to come home. He’s gone. Forever. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

For a moment, I wondered, What if she’s right?

“He’s not dead,” I said, my voice wavering and rocky. “He’s out there.”

“He’s not out there,” she said. “He’s dead.”

For a moment, I wondered, Is that possible?

And then the truth washed over me like a flood.



I sobbed so hard for so long that every day I would wake up with my eyes swollen shut. I didn’t get dressed for three weeks.

I cried for him, and for what I’d lost, and for every day left of my life that I had left to live without him.

My mom had to force me to bathe. She stood in the shower with me, holding my naked body up to the water, carrying my entire weight in her arms because I wouldn’t stand up on my own.

The world seemed so dark and bleak and meaningless. Life seemed so pointless, so cruel.

I thought of how Jesse took care of me and how he held me. I thought of how he felt when he ran his hands down my back, how his breath smelled sweet and human.

I lost hope and love and all of my kindness.

I told my mom that I wanted to die.

I said it even though I knew it would hurt her to hear it. I had to say it because of how much it hurt to feel it.

She winced and closed her eyes and then she said, “I know. But you can’t. You have to live. You have to find a way to live.”

Six weeks after I left Jesse at the airport, I came out of my bedroom, walked into the kitchen where my parents were talking, and I said, with a calmness and clarity of purpose that I had been lacking for weeks, “I want to go back to Acton. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

My father nodded and my mom said, “Whatever you need.”

I do not remember who packed up my things, who sold my car and my furniture. I do not remember getting on the plane. All I know is that, a week later, I landed at Logan Airport.

Home.





Emma and Sam

Or, how to put yourself back together





When you lose someone you love, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever feel better. That, one day, you’ll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order.

But it does happen.

If you’re patient and you work at it.

It starts just by breathing in the Massachusetts air again. Your soul recharges ever so slightly when you see brick walkways and brownstones in Boston, when you pull into your parents’ driveway and move back into your old bedroom.

Your emotional fortitude grows stronger as you sleep in your childhood bed and eat your mother’s pancakes for breakfast and hide from most of the world.

You spend all of your time watching the Travel Channel and you get so bored of it that you pick up a novel from the stack of books in your bedroom, the books that your parents have given you over the years that you refused to crack open until now.