He didn’t know about the blackouts.
“I should have bridesmaids! I should have had some terrible bachelorette party with dick-shaped lollipops, or something. But instead, I trailed after a skateboarding drug dealer all night. It’s pathetic.”
“Maybe a little.” Gavin rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m not going to lie to you. But as long as that’s where it ends, we can deal with it. You can kick the pills. It hasn’t affected your work. At least not much, right? I think you’re OK, and I’m OK. We’re OK, right? There’s nothing more is there?”
Betsy considered fessing up to her sleepovers with strangers, but then thought the better of it. Instead, she went on to the question.
“No, there’s nothing more,” she said, “but I need to know, the stuff Jay said tonight . . .”
“Oh God, screw Jay. He was wasted, and he’s always been spoiled, and he knows that you’re smarter than he is and he can’t take it. My parents felt so bad about what he said. They know what you’ve been through.”
“But is that how people think of me? As dark and uncaring? You’re this sweet, affable guy and I’m the moody one you’re saddled to? Because I feel like if I care even a tiny bit more, I’m going to break. I feel like I care so much about not hurting people that I can’t even move sometimes. And I end up hurting them anyway. And the worst part is that Ginny’s the reason I think I’m afraid to get close to people, and why I think I need to dull this pain, but I’m starting to forget,” she said. “I’m trying to remember her face, her features, the exact shade of her hair, and I can’t. All I have are these ancient pictures, which are starting to fade, too. And it makes me so sad.”
Gavin reached over to click on the light on the nightstand. He sat up in bed with his hair sticking up in every direction, squinting in the light.
“I know it’s hard to take me seriously when I’m not wearing a shirt, but you have to listen to me, Betsy, and listen very carefully,” he said. “I have been in love with you since that day on the dock at J.D.’s. You are kind and curious and smart. You are wry and observant and funny as hell. When I watch you look at some work of art that I don’t even try to understand, you concentrate so hard that your face contracts into these weird expressions that I have honestly never seen on another human being. You are braver than you think you are. You work so hard to do better, to be good. You always have. I didn’t know anybody else who was getting on a bike at 5:00 a.m. to go to work when we were in college, only you. Sometimes you struggle to fit in because, I don’t know why, maybe because you take things so seriously? So personally?”
“Gavin, I . . .”
“No, wait, let me finish. I am as surprised as the next guy that I met the woman I was going to marry when I was twenty-one years old. And, I admit, things have not been perfect between us every step of the way. But we are supposed to be together. I know we are. That day you lost Ginny, you found me. I wish like hell you could have had both of us, but that’s not how it worked out. And I’m sorry.”
She reached out and combed his hair with her fingers.
“I am nervous about so many things. I’m nervous about everything, really. But I am not nervous about you,” Betsy said. “You are the one thing I know I got right.” Gavin rested his head back on the pillow and pulled her close.
“You know, if you weren’t a little sad about the memories of Ginny fading, that’s what would make me worry.” He moved her hair out of her eyes. “And one thing I know, I really know for sure, is that if Ginny could see you crying about her on the night before your wedding, she’d kick your ass. Hard.”
“You definitely have a point there,” she said.
“So let’s just do this, together, like we’ve done all of that other crap, OK? Then when the chaos is over, we’re going to go back to being just fine. Or even better. I can feel it.”
CHAPTER 18
THE TOURIST
February 17, 1998
Six months into marriage, either the novelty had worn off, or February’s punishing deep freeze had muted her heady newlywed optimism, but life had gone back to business as usual—minus the blackouts—with impressive speed. Then she got the voice mail.
“Betsy, that’s as clean as that shower is ever going to get,” said Gavin. She had one toothbrush in her mouth, and another old one in her left hand, working at the graying grout under the showerhead. The mine-cut diamond and simple band on her ring finger was coated with a fine dusting of Comet, which would have bothered her eighteen months ago when he first slipped it on her finger, but didn’t anymore. The bathroom wasn’t great. No amount of Comet was going to change that.