James and I also honeymooned in Maui.
This is something I haven’t mentioned to Nick, because saying it out loud will cheapen that experience for me. Like it’s no longer special to me and James because he also took his mistress there. Which, if I’m being completely honest with myself, is true.
I watch the couple toasting each other with their Bloody Marys. The layers of their onion haven’t started to peel back. They aren’t to the part where she has to bite her tongue when he leaves his wet towel wadded on the bathroom floor again, and he hasn’t had to swallow his shitty remarks when she buys yet another pair of two-hundred-dollar shoes they can’t afford. The niceties and threshold for understanding haven’t slowly morphed into insults and raised voices. They’re still in that blessed time before the gloves come off, before they say fuck it, roll up their sleeves, and get in the ring.
“I feel bad for pushing you to get on this plane.”
“Don’t. I made up my own mind—I’m a big girl,” I say, pulling my jean jacket tighter across my chest, the recycled cold air blasting me from the overhead fan above us. I reach up to twist it closed but can’t quite get it.
“Here, let me.” Nick barely raises his long arm and shuts it off. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you decided to come. I don’t think I could have done this alone.” His voice catches, and he looks away quickly.
“Do you believe in karma?” he asks.
“You mean do I think they died because they were being unfaithful?”
“No, I actually meant do you ever wonder if you did something at some point and the universe is saying, ‘Here’s your retribution.’”
Before I can answer, he keeps going. “Sometimes I wonder what I did.” He looks down. “I’ve beaten myself up for the times I snapped at her after I’d been on a tough twenty-four-hour shift or when I lost my temper with a driver who cut me off on the 405 freeway. I wasn’t even close to perfect. Not to others. And certainly not to Dylan.”
“Neither was I,” I say, seeing flashes of our argument the last day I saw James. Dresser drawers slamming as he packed his bag. The accusation he slung at me, his words as heavy as a baseball bat. My hot tears after his ride pulled away.
“The last time you saw her—where did she tell you she was going?” I ask.
“To Arizona to visit her parents. That she’d be back in a few days.” He shakes his head. “She insisted I didn’t need to drop her off at the airport—something I still did, even after almost two years together. Now I know why.” He turns and looks out the window, and I follow his gaze, squinting at the sun.
I think of the first time James dropped me off at LAX. We’d only been dating for six weeks, and Beth and I were taking a girls’ trip to Vegas.
“You don’t have to drive us,” I said as I printed out my boarding pass, excited to be in group A on Southwest.
“I want to drop you off. I’m going to miss you,” he said, circling his arms around my waist as I watched the paper slide out of the printer. “Three days apart!”
“Are you really this romantic? Or is it because we’re still in the honeymoon stage? This is going to wear off, right?” I laughed, leaning my head to the side so he could kiss my neck.
“Never,” he said, turning me around to face him.
“Good,” I said, putting my hands on his stubbly cheeks and kissing him.
And he was right; it didn’t wear off.
It broke off.
As abruptly as a plate that falls to the kitchen floor. Seconds before, you’d held the perfect porcelain circle in your hand. And then, as soon as it hits the tile, it breaks in two jagged parts. Which is exactly how I’d describe the shift in James when he stopped loving me the same way. My romantic, big-hearted husband changed shape—into a fragment of who he’d been.
“What was it like between you and Dylan the last time you saw her?” I push aside the sound our front door had made when I’d heaved it closed behind James with all my strength, how it had rattled in the doorjamb so hard I was sure the window next to it was going to shatter, just like we already had.
“That’s the worst part for me, I think.” He pauses.
“If you don’t want to tell me, it’s okay. It’s personal.” I jump in and fill the space, realizing I don’t want to answer the same question. Because now he has me thinking about karma and my role in all this. And I don’t want to go there.
“I think we’re past personal at this point.” He smiles, but his eyes don’t join in. “I was just remembering her face—she was glowing. She looked so beautiful that day. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Just pink lipstick, I think. Yeah, that’s what it was. Because when I went to kiss her, she told me she didn’t want to get it on me and have me get shit from the guys at the station. I was on my way to work.”
He stops, and I can picture the scene in my mind. I imagine her wearing a T-shirt and jeans and watch as she playfully brushes off his kiss, standing on her pixie tiptoes and hugging him so she doesn’t have to feel his mouth on hers.
“I’ve replayed our conversation over and over looking for clues. But she seemed totally normal, talking to me about her last shift, and how she’d spilled a glass of red wine all over a woman wearing white linen pants. We’d laughed about how mortifying it had been—Dylan had grabbed a black cloth napkin to blot the wine off the woman and ended up making it worse—the napkin actually shed on the stain.” Nick smiled. “I remember watching her as she tried to mimic the woman’s Australian accent and thinking, wow, she’s in a great mood, she seems happy. I make this woman happy.” He stops again. “But it wasn’t me. I wasn’t the one who did that for her.” He rubs his palms over his eyes. “Sorry.”
“Please don’t apologize—especially not to me. I’m riding this emotional seesaw too.” I think about being in my bathroom this morning. Grabbing what I thought was my Prozac, prescribed by my gynecologist a couple of years back to help with the mood swings I’d started to experience around my period. I’d put them in the back of the medicine cabinet above our sink with the label turned away. James never said this, but I knew they were a reminder that I wasn’t pregnant.
I decided this morning that before I got on the plane, it might help to take one of my happy pills, as my doctor had referred to them after I told her about the anger I’d feel in the days before my cycle started. My recurring nightmare about James losing control of the car and plummeting down the cliff had kept me up most of the night, and I’d almost called Nick three different times to cancel, telling myself I’d made a huge mistake agreeing to go to Hawaii. But instead I’d accidentally grabbed a bottle of muscle relaxers that had been James’s—then dropped it like it was a hot skillet, the tiny white pills scattering around the sink. I’d clutched the edge of the counter as I watched the meds roll down the drain, some of them getting stuck and causing a pileup, and remembered why he’d had them in the first place.