One True Loves(76)

I shake my head without looking at him.

“And I have to stop pretending that it is. Especially because . . . I’m not the same, either. I know it seems like I don’t know that, but I do. I know I’ve changed. I’m know I’m . . .” I’m surprised to see that Jesse has begun to cry. I hold him tighter, listening, wishing I could take the pain away, spare him any more hardship on top of what he’s already faced. I want so badly to protect him from the world, to ensure nothing ever hurts him again. But I can’t, of course. No one can do that for anybody.

“I’m messed up, Emma,” he continues. “I’m not OK, I don’t think. I keep acting as if I feel OK here, but . . . I don’t. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. Not here, not there. I’m . . . struggling to keep it together almost every moment of the day. One minute I feel overwhelmed by how much food is around and then the next minute I can’t bring myself to eat any of it. The night I landed I woke up around three and went down to the kitchen and ate so much I made myself sick. The doctors say that I still need to be mindful of what I eat and how much, but I just want to eat nothing or everything. There’s no in-between. It’s not just food, either. When we were in the shower earlier, I was thinking, ‘We should get a bucket and save some of this water. Store it.’?”

He’s finally ready to say how he really feels and it’s all spilling out of him like a turned-over gallon of milk.

“I can’t even stand to look at my hand. I can’t stand to see that my finger is still gone. I know it sounds so stupid, but I think I thought that if I could just get home, then things could go back to the way they were. I’d get you back, and I’d feel normal again, and my pinkie would, I don’t know, magically reappear or something.”

He looks at me and he breathes in and then breathes out, all with great effort.

“Do you want to sit?” I ask him, pulling him toward the sofa. I sit him down and I take a seat beside him. I put my hand on his back. “It’s OK,” I say. “You can talk about it. You can tell me anything.”

“I just . . . I hate even thinking about it,” he says. “It was . . . awful. All of it. Losing my finger was maybe one of the most painful things I’ve ever been through. I have been working so hard to block it out.”

I am quiet in the hopes that he will keep talking, that he will continue to be honest with me and with himself, that he will share what he’s been through, what plagues him.

“I sliced it almost clean through,” he says finally. “Trying to open an oyster with a rock. I thought it might heal on its own but it wouldn’t. I lived with it growing more and more infected until I finally just had to . . .”

I can see that he can’t bring himself to speak the words.

But he doesn’t have to.

I know what he can’t say.

He had to cut off his own finger.

Somewhere in the years he’s been gone, he was forced to save his hand the only way he could.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to him.

I can’t imagine what else happened, how many days he went without food, how near he came to grave dehydration, the searing pain of being stung over and over as he was trying to swim to rescue. But I am starting to think that he will tackle that pain when he is ready, talking and admitting more as he grows stronger. It will be a long process. It may even be years until he can unpack it all. And even then, he’ll never be able to erase it completely.

The same way I’ll never be able to erase the ache of grieving him.

These are the things that have made us who we are.

I step away from Jesse for a moment and head into the kitchen. I look through the cabinets and find an old box of Earl Grey.

“How about some tea?” I offer.

He looks up at me and nods. It is so gentle as to be almost imperceptible.

I put two mugs of water in the microwave. I grab the tea bags.

“Keep talking,” I say. “I’m listening.”

His voice picks up again and I realize that he must have, whether it was conscious or subconscious, been waiting for permission.

“I think I’ve been trying to undo the last however many years,” he says. “I’ve been trying to put everything back the way it was before I left so it can be as if it never happened. But that doesn’t work. I mean, obviously it doesn’t. I know that.”

I stop the microwave before it beeps, pulling the mugs out and putting the tea bags in. The smell of the tea reminds me of Marie. I sit back down next to Jesse, putting his steaming cup in front of him. He takes it into his hand but he doesn’t drink it yet.

“I’m not the same person that I was back then,” he says. “You know it and I know it, but I just keep thinking that with a little effort, I can change that. But I can’t. I can’t, can I?”

He puts the mug down and starts gesticulating with his hands. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Acton,” he says. “I’ve spent too long trapped somewhere I didn’t want to be. I want to go back to California. I respect that Blair Books means as much to you as it does, but I don’t get it. We worked so hard to move away from New England, to get away from the life that our parents were pushing us toward. We sacrificed so much so that we could travel, not so that we could stay in one place. I don’t understand why you came back here, why you chose to spend your life here, doing exactly what your parents always told you you should do.