“Oh,” I say. “Yes, we’re going to make the drive back to Los Angeles.” What is she thinking right now? I can’t tell. She’s so stone-faced. Is she happy I’m leaving? Is this all the evidence she needs that I don’t belong in their lives?
“Okay,” she says. “Well.” She grabs my hand and squeezes it. “I wish you the best of luck, Elsie.”
“You too, Susan,” I say. I turn around and catch Ana’s eye, and we walk out the door. It isn’t until my feet have hit the cement in her driveway that I realize why I am so bothered by what she just said, aside from how disingenuous it was.
She thinks she’ll never see me again. It’s not like I live in Michigan. She could easily see me if she wanted to. She just doesn’t want to.
When we get home, I run to the bathroom and shut the door. I stand against it, holding the knob still in my hand. It’s over. Ben is over. This is done. Tomorrow people will expect me to start moving on. There is no more Ben left in my life. I left him in Orange County.
I lock the door behind me, calmly walk over to the toilet, and puke bacon-wrapped dates. I wish I had eaten more in the past few days so I’d have something to give. I want to expel everything from my body, purge all of this pain that fills me into the toilet and flush it down.
I open the bathroom door and walk out. Ana is standing there, waiting.
“What do you want to do?” she asks.
“I think, really, I’m just going to go to sleep. Is that okay? Do you think that’s bad? To go to sleep at”—I look at the clock on my cell phone; it is even earlier than I thought—“to go to bed at seven oh three p.m.?”
“I think you have had a very hard day and if you need to go to sleep, that’s okay. I’m going to go home and let my dog out and I’ll be back,” she says.
“No.” I shake my head. “You don’t need to, you can sleep in your own bed.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want you to be alone if you—”
“No, I’m sure.” I don’t know how she’s been sleeping here for all of these days, living out of a backpack, going back and forth.
“Okay.” She kisses me on the cheek. “I’ll come by in the morning,” she adds. She grabs her things and heads out the door, and when it closes, the apartment becomes dead and silent.
This is it. This is my new life. Alone. Quiet. Still. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Ben and I had mapped out our lives together. We had a plan. This wasn’t the plan. I’ve got no plan.
FEBRUARY
Ben called me from the car to tell me he would be late. Traffic was backed up.
“I’m stuck on the 405. Nobody’s moving and I’m bored,” he said to me. I had been at lunch with Ana and had just left and made my way home.
“Oh no!” I said, opening up my front door and placing my things on the front table. “How far away are you?”
“With this traffic I can’t even tell, which sucks because I want to see you,” he said.
I sat down on the couch and kicked my shoes off. “I want to see you too! I missed you all morning.” Ben had spent the night with me and left early to make the visit down to Orange County. He had planned on telling his mother about us and wanted to do it in person.
“Well, how did it go?” I asked.
“We went out to breakfast. She asked a lot about me. I kept asking about her, but she kept turning the conversation back to me and there just . . . there wasn’t an opening to say it. To tell her. I didn’t tell her.”
He didn’t say the phrase “I’m sorry,” but I could hear it in his voice. I was disappointed in him for the first time, and I wondered if he could hear it in mine.
“Okay, well . . . you know . . . it is what it is,” I said. “Is traffic moving? When do you think you’ll be home? Er . . . here. When do you think you’ll be here?” I had started to make this mistake more and more often, calling my home his home. He spent so much time here, you’d think he lived here. But paying rent in one place and spending your time in another was just the way things were done when you were twenty-six and in love. Living together was something entirely different, and I was showing my hand early by continuing to make that mistake.