One True Loves(72)

“It’s not that simple.”

“It should be! That’s what I’m saying. It should be that f*cking simple!”

I am both stunned at the anger directed at me and surprised it took this long for it to surface.

“Yeah, well, it’s not, OK? Life doesn’t always work out the way you think it will. I learned that when you left on a plane three years ago and disappeared.”

“Because I survived a crash over the Pacific Ocean! I watched everyone else on that helicopter die. I lived on a tiny scrap of a goddamn rock, alone, trying to figure out a way to get back to you. Meanwhile, what did you do? Forget about me by August? Submit for a name change by Christmas?”

“Jesse, you know that’s not true.”

“You want to talk about the truth? The truth is you gave up on me.”

“You were gone!” My voice goes from zero to sixty in three seconds and I can feel that my emotions are bursting out of me like a horse kept too long behind a gate. “We thought you were dead!”

“I honestly thought,” Jesse says, “that you and I loved each other in a way that we could never, ever forget about each other.”

“I never forgot you! Never. I have always loved you. I still love you.”

“You got engaged to someone else!”

“When I thought that you were dead! If I had known you were alive, I would have waited every day for you.”

“Well, now you know I’m alive. And instead of coming back to me, you’re sitting on the fence. You’re here with me, crying about him in the shower.”

“I love you, Jesse, and even when I thought you were gone, I loved you. But I couldn’t spend my life loving a man who was no longer here. And I didn’t think that’s what you’d want for me, either.”

“You don’t know what I’d want,” he says.

“No!” I say. “I don’t. I barely know you anymore. And you barely know me. And I feel like you want to keep pretending that we do.”

“I know you!” he says. “Don’t tell me I don’t know you. You are the only person in my entire life that I have truly, truly known. That I know loved me. That I have understood and accepted for exactly who they are. I know everything there is to know about you.”

I shake my head. “No, Jesse, you know everything about the person I was up until the day you left. But you don’t know me now. Nor do you seem to have any interest in seeing me for who I am today, or for sharing with me who you are today.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m different, Jesse. I was in my twenties when you left. I’m thirty-one now. I don’t care about Los Angeles and writing travel pieces anymore. I care about my family. I care about my bookstore. I’m not the same as I was when you left. The loss of you changed me. I changed.”

“I mean, fine. You changed because I was gone, I get that. You got scared, you were grieving, so you came back to Acton because it felt safe and you took over your parents’ store because it was easy. But you don’t have to do any of that anymore. I’m back. We can go home to California. We can finally go to Puglia. I bet you can even sell some pieces to a few magazines next year. You don’t have to have this life anymore.”

But I’m already shaking my head and trying to tell him no before he’s even finished. “You are not understanding me,” I say. “Maybe at first I came home to retreat from the world, and sure, initially, I took the job at the store because it was available. But I love my life now, Jesse. I choose to live in Massachusetts. I choose to run my store. I want this for myself.”

I look at Jesse’s face as he searches mine. I try a different tactic, a different way of explaining to him.

“When I’m in a sad mood, do you know what I do to cheer myself up?”

“You eat french fries and have a Diet Coke,” Jesse says, just as I say, “I practice the piano.”

The difference in our answers startles him. His body deflates slightly, pulling away from me. I can see, as it quickly wipes across his face, that it’s hard for him to reconcile my answer with who he believes that I am.

I imagine, for a moment, that the next words out of his mouth might be, “You play the piano?”

And I’d say yes and I’d explain how I got started and that I only know a few songs and that I’m not that good, but that it relaxes me when I’m feeling stressed. I’d tell him how Homer is normally asleep under it when I want to play, so I have to pick him up and put him on the bench beside me, but that it’s so nice to sit there next to my cat and play “Für Elise.” Especially when I pretend “Für Elise” is about his fur.

It would mean so much if Jesse wanted to fall in love with who I am today. If he opened up and let me fall in love with the truth about who he is now.

But none of that happens.

Jesse just says, “So you play piano. What does that prove?”

And when he says it, I know that the gap between us is even larger than I thought.

“That we are different people now. We grew apart. Jesse, I don’t know anything about what your life has been like for the past three and a half years and you won’t talk about it. But you are different. You can’t go through what you went through and not be different.”