THE DOORBELL RINGS A STRANGE, DEEP, FORMAL TUNE that echoes around the two-story living room, more like a funeral dirge than a greeting. I jump up from the hard surface of the couch, where I’ve been perched for the fifteen minutes since I’ve been home, waiting, vibrating with anticipation. I wouldn’t call it excitement, but not quite dread either. It’s a new kind of fear, one I can’t define. I can’t tell if it’s good or bad.
When I open the door, Evie is surrounded by sunlight. Her hair is in a new pixie cut, more styled than the fluffy, haphazard chemo grow-out of before. She’s wearing a light gray tank top and jeans with red Converse tennis shoes. Such a simple outfit, so clean and perfect. A thin silver ring loops around her left nostril.
“You got your nose pierced,” I say.
“Yeah.” She smiles. “Can I come in?”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.” I step aside.
“It was a birthday present, from my mom,” she says as she walks inside. “You should have seen her in the piercing studio.” Evie laughs as she sits down on the couch. “She was trying so hard to act cool, but she was so awkward. It was hilarious.”
I sit down across from her on an uncomfortable white leather armchair. “When was your birthday?” I say. How strange to not know that, to have never known that.
“Last week.”
I can’t bring my eyes to look at her face, so I stare at her knees, at her hands resting there, clasping and unclasping, naked of jewelry or nail polish.
“Why are you here?” I say, and it comes out sounding harsh, exactly as I’d intended it to.
She’s quiet for a moment, then says quickly, “I met your mother.”
“What?” My head snaps up. My eyes pierce hers.
“At an AA meeting.” She looks more uncomfortable than I remember ever seeing her. Embarrassed, even. She looks down, squeezes her hands between her knees. “This is weird,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Come on. Tell me.”
“She introduced herself after hearing me speak. I was talking about . . . you. And she recognized details of my story. And your name, too, I guess. So she approached me afterward.”
“You talk about me at AA meetings?”
She cannot look me in the eyes. “People talk about everything at AA meetings. It’s supposed to be anonymous, you know?”
“Except it wasn’t.”
“Well, no. Your mom probably broke all kinds of rules by talking to me, but she’s so worried about you. She was desperate.”
I can’t help but laugh, but there’s nothing funny about this. “Yeah,” I say. “Desperate. We’re all so fucking desperate.”
“She really loves you. She’s scared. She said you won’t talk to her or your dad, so she asked me if I’d talk to you. She said she’s afraid you might want to hurt yourself.”
The ceiling is pressing down on us. The walls squeeze in. There are no words to speak, no air to breathe, no space to move in. The panic surges in my chest, and I am shaking with the need to run.
“I can’t do this,” I blurt out. “Not here. Not in this house.” I stand up. “Can we go for a walk or something?”
“Um, sure,” she says. “Okay.” She grabs her bag and follows me out the door.
That’s something I remember loving about her. She calls her purse a bag instead of a purse. She refused to be the kind of girl who carries a purse.
No. I have to push those kinds of thoughts out of my head now. All of her little endearing qualities. The little details I fell in love with.
Being outside gives my feelings room to grow. We walk a couple of blocks, and I notice Evie’s limp is gone. For some reason, this makes me angry—her healing, her strength, all of it having happened without me, after all the energy and love I invested in her, in us. My anger feeds on the air, on the sun, becomes a monster, and consumes me.
“After all this time avoiding me, why come here now?” I say. “Why do you even care?”
“I care more than you could possibly know, Marcus.” She sounds so patronizing. The way she says my name. The pitying tone of her voice.
“Yeah, you care so much you stopped talking to me.”
“I had to. For a while. I already explained that to you.” We stand at the corner waiting for the light to change. “I have to figure some things out,” she says. “I need some time to clear my head.”
“Yeah?” I start walking, even though the light is still red. A car honks as it barely misses me. “What about my head? Did you ever think about how it would affect me?”
“I’m sorry,” she says, running after me to the other side of the street. She grabs my arm and makes me stop. “I thought you were okay. I thought you’d be okay. You were always the strong one.”
I laugh, but there is no humor in it. “It’s great you and my mom found each other,” I say. “You have so much in common.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You both think because someone doesn’t fall apart on a regular basis or go spewing their feelings all over the place, it means they can’t get hurt. You think you can leave and they’ll be fine, and you won’t have to worry about breaking anyone’s heart. Your conscience will be off the hook.”
“No, that’s not—”
“Just because my feelings aren’t as messy as yours doesn’t mean I don’t have them.”
“Marcus, I—”
“Yours were so big and loud, there wasn’t any room for mine.”
The silence burns as I walk away, and for the first time ever, she runs after me. So I let her chase me. I want her to know what it feels like to be shut out.
But eventually, I slow down. The truth is, as much as I want to hurt her, I still want her next to me.
“You’ve changed,” she says.
“Being betrayed will do that to a person.”
She flinches, takes a deep breath. My body still responds to hers, even after these weeks apart. “I’ve been preparing what I wanted to say to you for a long time,” she says. “But I kept chickening out when I tried to call you. Then your mom approached me, and I figured it was a sign that it was time to talk.”
Without thinking, I have led us to the cemetery where we went on our first date. Where we first made love. I fight the urge to turn around. I walk through the iron gates to the big fountain near the entrance. The sound of the water silences everything around us. I sit on a stone bench facing it.
“So talk,” I say.
After a pause, she says, “You want someone you think is me.”
I don’t say anything. The sentence hangs in the air, all alone, without context.
“I’m not her. I’m not the girl you loved. The one you think you want. That girl who acted invincible.”
“What are you talking about?” The water in the fountain falls in slow motion.
“That girl was made out of drugs and alcohol and lies. She wasn’t me.”
“You can’t tell me you weren’t in there. You can’t tell me that wasn’t you at all.”
“But it wasn’t all of me.”
“So show me all of you!” Evie flinches. My hands are shaking and my body throbs with electricity. People look. Dogs sniff the air, smelling something sinister. They think I am the kind of guy who yells at his girlfriend in public. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m more like my father than I’ve ever wanted to admit.
“I don’t know how,” she says quietly. “I don’t know who that is.”
I am sick of this bullshit. I’m sick of dancing around the truth.
“Do you still love me?” I say.
“Marcus, don’t.”
“Answer the question.”
“You’re changing the subject. It’s irrelevant.”
“Love’s irrelevant?” I hear my father’s voice. I hear myself debating like him, asking questions that cannot be answered.
“You’re not listening.”
“Why won’t you answer the question?”
She’s shutting down. Her eyes lose focus and her hands fidget. She’s putting up her wall. She’s leaving me.
“Answer the question, Evie. Do you love me?”
She shakes her head and says nothing. Her shoulders curl as she closes in on herself.
“Does that mean no? You don’t love me?”
She says no so quietly I might not have heard her if I wasn’t staring at her quivering lips.
“No, what?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“What?” I say. “I can’t hear you.”
“Yes!” she yells. “Dammit, Marcus. Yes, of course I still fucking love you.”
Her body shakes in the silence. I want to take back everything, all my pushing, my bullying. But I can’t. Neither of us can ever take back anything we’ve done to each other.
“That’s not the problem,” Evie says. “That’s never been the problem. I just . . . how can I trust my love for you when I don’t know who I am? How can that love possibly make any sense?”
“Maybe love’s not supposed to make sense.”
She shakes her head slowly. “I lost myself somewhere,” she says quietly. “I used to think I knew exactly who I was. I never questioned it. I didn’t have to. There was this version of me that existed before the cancer, some girl I don’t even recognize.”
“The cheerleader girl.”
“Yeah,” she says with a self-hating smirk. “You would have hated her. The cheerleader with the long blond hair and the perfectly nice football boyfriend.”
“I wouldn’t have hated her.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
She’s quiet for a moment as she stares at the fountain. “I hate her because I’m jealous. Her life was so simple. It was so easy being her.”
“But she isn’t you.”
“Not anymore. Even if I wanted to be her again, I couldn’t. Getting sick changed everything, and I can’t ever go back. I became a different version of me, the dying version.”
“But you’re not dying anymore.”
“No, but I accepted that was the last me there was going to be.” She’s growing agitated. Her voice is shaky, angry. She’s talking fast. “But I didn’t die. So I had to become yet another version of myself. Even though I didn’t want to. Even though I was done. So I had to get high to deal with it, just to make it not hurt. And I lied to everyone. I lied to you.” She’s crying now. She leans over her knees, her face in her hands. “That’s the girl you knew. That’s who you fell in love with. But she doesn’t exist anymore either.” I can see the bones of her spine through smooth skin as her body quakes. Fragile, worn, breaking. I fight the urge to touch her. I don’t know if I have that right anymore.
“I’m not her, Marcus,” Evie cries. “I’m not that wild girl who wants to party. I’m not that girl who doesn’t give a shit about anything.”
“I never thought you were,” I say, wanting so much to hold her, to make her understand. The girl she’s talking about is not who I loved. That’s who I wanted to save her from.
Evie looks at me and blinks, like my response was not the one she expected. “You gave a shit about something,” I say. “You gave a shit about me. That was real. I felt it.”
She sniffles and looks at me, into my eyes. “You were the only thing I cared about,” she says, letting me in, and my heart leaps into hers.
“Yes.” I take her hand and hold it against my heart. For a moment, it feels perfect. For a moment, it feels like the world is starting again. But then she pulls her hand away. Her eyes turn back into ice.
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Marcus, don’t you see? That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. You can’t be the only thing. You can’t be the thing that defines me.”
“I never asked to be. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
“But I don’t know how to do anything else.”
Neither of us know what to say after that. We sit there for a while, exhausted, surrounded by the dense cloud of our words. Nothing is settled. Nothing is resolved. The fountain continues its circular flow. Coins glisten on the tile bottom, a collection of strangers’ wishes and dreams. I reach into my pocket and pull out a quarter. I cannot hear its splash as I add my dream to the anonymous others.
“So now what?” I finally say.
“I don’t know.”
“So am I allowed to call you now that I have your new number?” I try to make it sound funny, but it falls flat. It belly flops in the fountain. It drowns.
Evie is quiet for a long time, and the beginning of hope flutters in my chest, my heart a hummingbird. My hand begins to move from its place on the concrete bench, a slight stirring, on the way to find hers where it rests on her knees.
“No,” she says finally. Firmly.
My hand stops in midair, sinks back to the hard flatness of the bench. My coin is lost among the other wasted money in the fountain.
She shakes her head with her eyes closed. “I’m not ready. Not yet.” Then her eyes open and tear me apart. “Maybe not ever.”
Evie’s eyes bore into me, but I will not look at her. I can’t. “I need you to let me go, Marcus,” she says, and my head is filled with static, loud and grating.
“Fine,” I say, my voice as cruel as I’ve ever heard it. “Go.”
She doesn’t move.
“Go!”
She stands up. She starts walking. She leaves too easily.
Stop! I want to say. Come back!
I wait for her to turn around, to look back, to say something, to make things right, to apologize, explain, anything. But she says nothing. She keeps walking away, holding her bag tight against her body. I sit on the hard bench, my feet heavy on the ground, fighting the rising fire in my chest, the tears in my eyes, waiting for a look that never comes. Just the sound of the fountain, so loud I can’t hear Evie’s footsteps as she leaves me, again.