Should I bring dinner? I bet Roy would like a chicken.
I’m making popovers. I’ve decided to be the Reigning Prince of Popovers.
A tinfoil crown is definitely in order then.
Oh, we are so clever, aren’t we? Tinfoil hats and well-punctuated text messages—that’s us. So funny and chaste and clever and innocent. And it is December second, and he is leaving on December fifteenth, and that will be that.
I sit at my table with aluminum foil and a pair of scissors and a cardboard cutout of a crown. What am I doing? Why, making him a crown, of course. To make him smile. To keep up the joke, to make one of our last evenings together fun and companionable.
So he’ll think as he’s driving cross-country: Yes, we had such fun, she and I.
Fun, fun, fun.
I slam the scissors down on the table and stand up. Oh my God. I want him. I want to unwrap him, press my head against his chest. I want his mouth grazing my nipple. I want to be in his bed with him again, but I want to be on top of him. I want him to kiss me and not look at me like I’m some kind of monster that he can’t give in to.
I want Patrick. I want him, I want him, I want him, I want him.
I look around the kitchen. The sky is darkening outside already, the lights of the skyline shining against the thick gray clouds of night. I walk around the room, my arms folded tight across my chest, my heart beating so fast.
I want him.
When I squint, I see them. The sparkles.
Oh my goodness, I see the sparkles again. They’re back.
If I had the spell book from his patio, maybe I could figure out if there’s a little bit of magic that might work on him. On us, before the time runs out.
Then I remember something. The first night I met her, she gave me a scarf when I was leaving. And it’s hanging in the closet. I saw it the other day when I was looking at everything. Somehow it’s always seemed too fancy for me.
Like it would have been cheating to wear Blix’s essence around my neck that way. But now tonight, we need the big guns.
It goes all wrong from the moment I get there. I’m too shy or too forward or too tense. I forget to bring the chicken, and when I offer to go get one at Paco’s, Patrick says not to bother. And I’m wearing a dress, which I see is ridiculous, because you can’t unpack boxes in a dress—you can’t search through magical artifacts when you’re dressed like you wanted to be out at dinner or at a movie instead.
And why did you do it? Because you wanted to look beautiful.
I’m wearing the best thing in my closet, the black-striped dress with the leggings. The dress that shows a bit of cleavage. Patrick might appreciate the cleavage, and he could peel off the leggings—that’s what I was thinking, Your Honor. I plead guilty to lustful thoughts while getting dressed.
But now I am here, and there is no chicken, and the popovers are just popovers—flour and milk and eggs and air. And he is in a mood—too jokey, too something. Brittle, somehow. Guarded.
I tell him about Noah and the story of Blix being in line to inherit the family mansion but then having it stolen from her, and I make it all dramatic—too dramatic—and he asks questions I can’t answer. And I’m acting all flustered and he looks at me funny, and it’s probably written all over my face: Dude, I want you.
But we can’t. He won’t.
We sit on the floor and go through the boxes, and there’s really nothing to it. The book of spells is at the bottom of a box that contains Blix’s muumuus and caftans, the dress she wore to my wedding, some fabulous scarves and coats. I take out the book and open it, and I say, “Look at all this magic! It makes me feel like she’s right here when I see it.”
He suddenly gets up and goes over to the sink and starts washing dishes.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
“Nothing.”
“Is it the Blix stuff?”
He hesitates, bites his lip. Puts a cup in the dish drainer. “It’s the anniversary of the fire.”
“Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, I’m not fit for company. I’m sorry. I should be by myself.”
I go over to the sink and I reach over and touch him, and to my surprise, he doesn’t pull away. I touch his arm and then his hand, where the scars are. I take his hand out of the soapy water. Slowly I run my finger along a ridge of scar tissue. He lets me.
“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” I say. “You couldn’t have changed it.”
When he speaks, his voice is ragged, and he pulls his arm away from me. “Yeah, well. If it hadn’t been for those ten seconds . . . do you see that if somehow those ten seconds didn’t happen, everything would have been different? Ten seconds, and the world doesn’t have any oxygen left for me. It’s like the color blue is missing or something, everything good drained away. I can’t—I don’t feel anything.”
“Oh, Patrick.”
“My life—you really don’t know me. You don’t see that my life is a before and after, and that I have to live in the shadows.”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “I know what’s going on here.”
“And what is that?” He closes his eyes. “Not enough magic?”
“No. You are feeling again. You’re seeing there’s a bridge to healing, and you’re not sure you want to cross it. You might get hurt again. You can stay on the planet of My Lover Died in the Fire as long as you want, but eventually I think you’re going to want some company there. Because you survived the fire. And you can heal from this. I think—and I could be wrong about this, so don’t get mad—but I think you really can do art again.”
He’s staring at me. Now I have done it. I’ve gone too far. “Did you really say that? That I’m on the planet of My Lover Died in the Fire?”
“I believe I did.”
“Well, thank you very much for that image, but I’m not going to do art again. I’m going to planet Leave Me the Fuck Alone, Wyoming, and I’m going to walk along the plains by myself and watch television with my sister.”
“Um, giving up.”
“Call it whatever you like.”
“I do call it giving up, because, Patrick, I have this unshakable idea about you, which is based on knowing that when the worst thing that ever happened to you happened, you didn’t run away from it. You ran toward that fire. And that man isn’t going to get away with walking alone on the plains and watching television with his sister. You’re healing right now. Don’t you see that? This is probably like when those horrible burn wounds were healing, and they hurt like hell. This is what your spirit is doing right now, too. But then maybe things will get better, one angstrom unit at a time. You can get your life back.”
He turns off the water. “Shut the fuck up,” he says. But he is smiling in a weird way.
“I honestly think you do not want to give up.”
He closes his eyes then, like everything just hurts too much. I go over and take Blix’s journal and books and my letter out of the boxes, and then I seal them back up with the packing tape. And then I do the bravest/stupidest thing I’ve ever done, which is tell Patrick that I love him, and that no matter what he thinks, it’s not pity and it’s not any of those other lesser values. It’s love, love, love.
I even say it loudly: “Love, love, love.”
And he does not respond, because he is lost beyond my reach. He has traveled as far as he can go, and he didn’t get to where I’m standing.
I’ve watched enough dramatic movies to know that there’s nothing to be done. Taking off my clothes wouldn’t help, begging won’t help, even throwing plates or singing or starting to make out with him. Nothing I can think of will help. Not magic, not making him laugh, not feeding him a popover one morsel at a time.
So, while I still have one shred of pride left, I go home.
Because the wisdom that William Sullivan doesn’t know is the thing I remember best: When all is lost, the Law of Giving Up will save you every time. But it only works if you’re really, really giving up.
And I am.