One True Loves(54)

Marie rolls her eyes and puts two packets in her tea.

I laugh and look down toward my cup. I watch as the tea begins to bleed out of the bag into the water. I watch as it swirls, slowly. I can already smell the earthiness of it. I put my hands on the hot mug, letting it warm them up. I start absent-mindedly fiddling with the string.

“Do you think you can love two people at the same time?” I ask her. “That’s what I keep wondering. I feel like I love them both. Differently and equally. Is that possible? Am I kidding myself?”

She dips her tea bag in and out of the water. “I’m honestly not sure,” she says. “But the problem isn’t who you love or if you love both, I don’t think. I think the problem is that you aren’t sure who you are. You’re a different person now than you were before you lost Jesse. It changed you, fundamentally.”

Marie thinks, staring down at the counter, and then tentatively starts talking again. “I don’t think you’re trying to figure out if you love Sam more or Jesse more. I think you’re trying to figure out if you want to be the person you are with Jesse or you want to be the person you are with Sam.”

It’s like someone cracked me in half and found the rotten cancer in the deepest, most hidden part of my body. I don’t say anything back. I don’t look up. I watch as a tear falls from my face and lands right in my mug. And even though I was the one who cried it out, and I saw it fall, I have no idea what it means.

I look up.

“I think you’re probably right,” I say.

Marie nods and then looks directly at me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s important to me that you know that. That you know I regret what I did.”

“Regret what? What are you talking about?”

“For that day on the roof. The day that I found you looking out . . .” It feels like yesterday and one hundred years ago all at once: the binoculars, the roof, the grave anxiety of believing I could save him just by watching the shore. “I’m sorry for convincing you Jesse was dead,” Marie says. “You knew he wasn’t . . .”

Marie isn’t much of a crier. She isn’t one to show how she feels on her face. It’s her voice that tells me just how deep her remorse is, the way some of the syllables bubble up and burst.

“I was the wrong person to be up there that day. I hadn’t supported you, at all, really, in any of the years prior. And suddenly, I was the one telling you the worst had happened? I just . . . I thought he was gone. And I thought that I was doing you a kindness by making you face reality.” She shakes her head as if disappointed in her old self. “But instead, what I did was take away your hope. Hope that you had every reason to hold on to. And I . . . I’m just very sorry. I’m deeply sorry. You have no idea how much I regret taking that away from you.”

“No,” I say. “That’s not what happened. Not at all. I was crazy up on that roof. I’d gone absolutely crazy, Marie. It was irrational to think that he was alive, let alone that I could save him, that I could spot him up there, looking at that tiny piece of the shore. That was madness.

“Anyone thinking clearly would have made the assumption that he was dead. I needed to understand that the rational conclusion was that he was gone. You helped me understand that. You kept me sane.”

For the first time, I find myself wondering if facing the truth and being sane aren’t the same thing, if they are just two things that tend to go together. I’m starting to understand that they might be correlational rather than synonyms.

And then I realize that if I don’t blame Marie for thinking he was dead—if I don’t see her belief that he died as a sign she gave up on him—then I shouldn’t be blaming myself for doing the same thing.

“Please don’t give it another thought,” I say to her. “What you did on the roof that day . . . you saved me.”

Marie looks down at her tea and then nods. “Thank you for saying that.”

“Thank you for what you did. And I’m glad it was you. I don’t know if you and I would be as close . . . I mean, I think we would have just gone on . . .”

“I know what you mean,” Marie said. “I know.”

After all of our shared experiences and our parents’ cajoling, it has been our hardships that have softened us to each other. Losing my husband and the challenges of raising Marie’s twins are the things that have brought us together.

“I’m just glad that things between us are the way they are now,” Marie says. “I’m very, very glad.”

“Me, too,” I say.

Instinctively, I grab Marie’s hand and hold it for a moment and then we break away.

It is hard to be so honest, so vulnerable, so exposed. But I find that it always leads you someplace freer. I feel the smallest shift between my sister and me, something almost imperceptible but nevertheless real. We are closer now than we were just three minutes ago.

“I’ve been thinking about writing again,” Marie says, changing the subject.

“Oh yeah?” I ask. “Writing what?”

She shrugs. “That’s the part I’m not sure about. I just need to do something, you know? Anything that is not revolving around my kids. I need to get back to me, a little bit. Anyway, it might be a dumb idea because I say that I want to start writing again but I can’t find anything I want to write about. I’m not inspired. I’m just . . . well, bored.”