I was numb, but beneath it was a blistering anger, too. Even at the time, I knew it wasn’t quite right, I couldn’t quite connect the dots, but the tiny kernel of hurt over Elliot with Emma got all wrapped up in Dad and why he came to get me in the first place. I needed Elliot, wanted him there. I saw the first few of his frantic texts, his insistence that it was a mistake. But then I vacillated between wanting him to know that I’d been shattered, and wanting him to know that he’d been the one to lift the mallet. And then it felt better to think he wouldn’t know. He could have every other bit of my heart, but not this.
Like I said, I remember how it felt, and it felt like insanity.
Kennet and Britt took me back with them to Minnesota for four months. I picked at my cuticles until they bled. I cut off my hair with kitchen shears. I woke up at noon and counted the minutes until I could go back to bed. I didn’t argue when Kennet sent me to therapy, or when he and Britt sat at the dining room table, sifting through my college acceptance letters and weighing whether to send me to Tufts or Brown.
I remember everything up to Britt’s decisive tapping of the papers, her double take when she saw me standing at the foot of the stairs, and her satisfied “We’ve got it all figured out, Macy.”
After that, there is nothing. I don’t remember how they managed to secure my diploma. I don’t remember sleeping my way through the summer. I don’t remember packing for college.
I have to believe the administration prepped Sabrina in some way, though she insists they didn’t. For sure they handpicked her: she’d lost her brother in a car accident two summers before.
I also have to believe that leaving Berkeley saved me. By December, I could go minutes without thinking about Dad. And then an hour. And then long enough to take an exam. My coping mechanism was to wrap my thoughts—when they came—into a scrap of paper, then discard them like a piece of gum. Sabrina would let the ache tear through her. I would curl up and sleep until I was sure the thought could be wrapped up tight.
Time. I knew well enough that time numbed certain things—even death.
now
monday, january 1
Elliot sits back, eyes glassy, and stares out my bedroom window.
I watch it all pass over him: the horror, the guilt, the confusion, the dawning realization that my dad died the day after Elliot cheated, that Dad was coming to get me because I’d been so upset and hadn’t called, that the last day I saw my dad was eleven years ago today . . . and for many years, I’ve blamed Elliot for it.
His nostrils flare, and he blinks away, jaw tight. “Oh, my God.”
“I know.”
“This . . . explains.” Elliot shakes his head, digging a hand into the front of his hair. “Why you didn’t call me back.”
Quietly, I tell him, “I wasn’t thinking very clearly—after—I wasn’t able to separate—you. And it.”
I’m so bad at words.
“Holy shit, Macy.” Catching himself, he turns and pulls me back into his arms, but it’s different.
Stiffer.
I’ve had more than a decade to deal with this; Elliot has had two minutes.
“When you stopped me outside Saul’s,” I say into his shirt, “and asked how Duncan was?”
He nods against me. “I had no idea.”
“I thought you knew,” I told him. “I thought you would have heard . . . somehow.”
“We didn’t have anyone else in common,” he says quietly. “It was like you disappeared.”
I nod, and he tightens. Something seems to occur to him. “All this time you weren’t out there thinking that I intentionally slept with Emma, knew your dad died, and was fine with it, were you?”
I try my best to explain the fogginess of my logic at the time. “I don’t think I really thought about it like that—that you were fine with it. I knew you were trying to call me. I knew, rationally, that you did love me. But I thought that maybe you and Emma had more of a thing going on than you ever told me. I was embarrassed and heartbroken . . .”
“We didn’t have a thing,” he says urgently.
“I think it was Christian who said you two hooked up sometimes—”
“Macy,” Elliot says quietly, cupping my face so I’ll look at him. “Christian is an idiot.