Mr. Nobody(86)
A hundred yards from him I slow my pace, breath heaving in and out of me. He’s not wearing shoes, he’s taken them off; no coat either.
“Matthew?” I yell over the wind.
Either he doesn’t hear me or he doesn’t want to. I try again, louder, as I jog on toward him, but he doesn’t turn. I try something else.
“STEPHEN!”
He stops in his tracks.
I stop now too, twenty yards between us, and watch, panting, as he turns to face me. He holds my gaze, exposed, for a long moment. His eyes full of so much—so much apology, so much vulnerability, so much understanding—and then with a sad smile he shrugs, not carelessly but as a kind of explanation.
Something about it is so touching my heart yawns wide open in my chest. His borrowed clothes, his borrowed life, his cold bare feet and the fact that no one even missed Stephen. Almost two weeks on the front page of every national paper, on the news daily, and only doddery old Nigel Wilton recognized him. Stephen has no one.
But Matthew, Matthew had everyone. It was a no-brainer.
He watches me as I approach him again, and when I’m close enough he opens his mouth to speak.
“It was the gates, wasn’t it?” he calls over the howl of the wind.
I nod. “And…you had a visitor today.”
He frowns, perplexed.
“Nigel. A friend of your mother’s?”
His eyebrows shoot up and he lets out a surprised laugh. “Ah, I see.”
“Stephen, I’m sorry about what happened to you. About your loss.”
He nods mutely, eyes cast across the dunes in the distance. “I never meant for all this, you know, Emma.”
“I know you didn’t,” I say.
Because we never do, do we? Any of us. Sometimes we just start down a road and before we know it things spiral out of control. People get hurt. We get hurt. “Will you come back with me, Stephen? To the hospital?”
He looks past me, back toward the forest, considering his options. “Is it just you here, Emma?”
“Yes. I got someone to drop me. They went back to get help. I wasn’t sure what I would find when I got here.” I catch a flicker of something behind his eyes and quickly add, “But I can tell them not to come. We can get somewhere with signal, then we can just sort this all out together,” I continue. “Just you and I. I promise.”
But that’s a lie. We both know it. We can’t sort this out together. Because now I know who he is. I know and I will have to tell other people and those people will tell other people and then the whole world will know that he lied. So, no, this can’t all be sorted out between us.
He knows the game has ended. Unless I decide to try to keep it going.
He studies me for a long moment, weighing his options. “I’ve been trying to get you on your own for so long now,” he says, his eyes warm with feeling. “I wanted you to know. I wanted to tell you, just you—I thought if I could explain everything to you maybe you’d understand—but there were always other people just around the corner. I wanted to be your Matthew so much.”
“Come back with me and we can talk, Stephen. I promise you. Just us.”
“I don’t think so, Emma.” He shakes his head. “I think I’ll stay here. But thank you. And I’m sorry, you know. Sorry for everything, everything that’s happened to you because of me.”
For putting my career in danger, my life. He waits for a moment, eyes cast into the distance beyond me as he gives a final nod and turns back toward the sea.
“Stephen, you don’t have to do this!” I shout after him.
He turns back suddenly, the floodgates seeming to burst within him, as words pour violently from him, vibrating with emotion.
“I do! All my life, Emma, all my life I’ve been invisible. I thought if I left here, if I went somewhere new, to London, if I started a new life, a new job, things would change. I’d live this amazing life, out there in the world. I’d have these brilliant friends and be part of something bigger, something important. I’d connect. I’d create, tell stories. But it didn’t happen that way, it just didn’t. It’s lonely out there. And people aren’t often kind, they’re just as broken and as cruel as us. I wasted years, years of my life and on what? Chasing some notion, some dream. And meanwhile the only person I ever really loved died. The only real connection I had.” He frowns. “She’d forgotten everything by the time I made it back up here. My mother. I kept putting it off. I knew she was getting worse and I waited too long. She’d forgotten me—she’d forgotten she even had a son! I don’t think people can understand how much that hurts. The only real connection you have just evaporating. I could have gone back to London after the funeral, back to my own life, back to my one-bed flat and my shitty part-time job, but why? There’s nothing there for me! I could have gone back and hoped for the best, hoped that someday…what? That I’d meet somebody? Somebody who really sees me? Who really cares? Who can get past the surface? Do you know how hard that is? The statistical likelihood of that happening? And the lonelier you get, the harder it is to hide it. It festers inside you, like a wound you can’t conceal. People sense it, they sense it more the harder you try to hide it. And I’m tired of hiding it. I’m tired of waking up every morning to a future I can’t quite see. So, to answer you: Yes, Emma. Yes, I do have to do this, because I don’t want to go back to the way things were—and I certainly don’t want to go back to worse. I would have given anything to be Matthew but I can’t be Stephen anymore.” His words hang in the air, his chest heaving from the storm of words. His eyes scan the pine forest behind me, lost, because what more can he say, really?