“Disbarred,” I said.
Kevin closed his eyes and his head dropped. “Heartbroken. I don’t want to be heartbroken, but maybe it’s already too late.” He stood up and went to the window to look out, at anything. “You should have told me.”
“Told you what?”
“You haven’t actually denied anything, do you realize that? You haven’t said, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kevin, nothing illegal’s going on, I never stole any money from the Titan Corporation.”
“Kevin.” I joined him at the window. “Nothing illegal’s going on.” Beat. “Anymore.”
“I don’t believe this.” He stormed to the other side of his tiny living room. “I don’t believe this!”
“Please, don’t freak out on me.” I followed after him. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I was only trying to protect you.”
“No. No, you don’t get to rationalize any part of this. I put up with a lot, but you stole money from Robert Barlow?”
“It wasn’t stealing exactly.”
“And Emily, too?”
“It’s kind of all her fault.”
“Oh my god. What were you two thinking?”
“Kevin, listen to me . . .” My mind raced in such a way that I experienced every trauma to come in sped-up form: the getting kicked to the curb, the being left there to die, alone, forever and ever.
But I had nothing to say for myself. I had no valid excuses. What we did was wrong, it was so wrong! So I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed Kevin by the collar and shoved my tongue into his mouth.
He hurled me off him like I was a ravenous zombie. “You’re insane,” he said. “And I think you need to go.”
“You can’t kick me out,” I cried. “I love you!”
“Now? Now you decide to say that?”
I grabbed at him again. “But it’s true. It isn’t any less true just because I waited till now to tell you. Please, Kevin.”
He steered me toward the door.
“Please don’t,” I said. “I need you.”
“Tina, it’s over.” He opened the door and shuffled me out. “I’m done.”
25
OF COURSE on my way back home from Kevin’s, I got caught in a heavy, melodramatic rain that left me drenched by the time I dropped like a felled tree onto my bed. I closed my eyes and listened to the storm pounding at my windows, thinking about how my life was over. Which was something I’d thought a number of times before, to an embarrassing degree, but this time it had to be true. Because what else did I have to lose?
What else could possibly go wrong?
It was a masochist’s favorite question, and intuitively one knows the asking is a dare. It’s: Go on, nothing can bring me any lower; I have nothing left to care about.
And so the impossible and inevitable happened while I was just lying there feeling sorry for myself. I never even saw it coming.
It was a break, a cascade. Not the clean trickle of baptism, more the membrane-addled gush of the womb. Plaster. Paint chips. Crumbly gray cement. When the ceiling rain bubble finally burst, it erupted ninety years’ worth of spackle matter all over my head.
My sheets were muddled to charcoal black and brown, soaked through to the mattress. My hair, stuck wet to my face, smelled inexplicably of ashes.
I looked up and was surprised to find an opening no bigger than the circumference of a quarter—surrounded by a flailing popped balloon.
Amazing, I thought. Drop by drop, how much it grew, how much matter it collected over time.
I plugged the anticlimactic hole with a plastic I-heart-NY bag and some masking tape. I tossed my sheets into the trash. I didn’t have any clean sheets to replace them with, but I hadn’t thought that part through.
I took a shower.
Only then did I begin to cry, because, in truth, there is nothing more self-satisfying than sobbing in a steaming shower.
That’s how Emily found me, sodden and pruned, curled up on the shower floor. We didn’t have a bathtub, mind you, so it was a stand-up shower I was lying down in, no easy feat for a full-grown adult. Luckily I only ever got to be half-grown. Still, my thigh or elbow must have been blocking the drain because I’d managed to flood the room.
Emily was standing ankle-deep in water. “What happened?” she asked.
“The rain bubble popped,” I said.
“And it made this big of a mess?”
I shook my head. “Kevin broke up with me.”
Emily’s perfectly symmetrical Anglo-Saxon features did a thing I’d never seen them do before. They warped hideously with grief. She knelt down and lifted me up from my puddle. “Why?”
“Because I’m me,” I said. “He finally figured it out.”