At 21, Zach was in a car accident. He and a friend were driving late coming back from a concert, and his friend took the off ramp too fast in the snow. The car flipped over. His friend panicked. Zach was more terrified of what would happen if they didn’t get out of the car than he was of what had already happened. As calmly as he could, he asked the driver whether he was hurt and instructed him to turn off the engine, brace himself against the ceiling and undo his seatbelt. The car was totaled, but they both got home safe that night, with just a few stitches between them.
Zach was in bed staring at the ceiling, replaying that night and picturing a different ending, one in which he stayed put and waited for a semi to take him out.
That would have spared him everything he was feeling now. He was not the calm passenger now. He was upside down and helplessly bound up in his panic.
But you wouldn’t know it just by looking at him, motionless, expressionless. “Fucking worthless,” he muttered to himself.
He’d done it again, hadn’t he? He tried to be what someone else needed, and once they saw what a fraud he was, what a selfish liar, they left. Who wouldn’t?
His phone vibrated. He quickly smothered any hope it was her. It wouldn’t be. She wasn’t weak of conviction like he was.
Seth had texted him.
Seth
He needed a lobotomy. That would be just dandy right about now.
Zach
Seth
Zach
Seth
Zach
Seth
Some time later — Zach didn’t know or care — Seth did show up with the promised alcohol. Zach took the bottle out of his hands.
“I fucked up.”
Seth sighed and squeezed past him into the house. “I don’t know that I’d say that. It’s a complex situation in a very new relationship. With a very complex person,” Seth said.
“Who has been hurt before and didn’t want to let her guard down around me until I convinced her to,” Zach said. He poured himself a shot of the Blanton’s then offered one to Seth. Seth took it but declined a second. “I’m not surprised Era wants to take a baseball bat to my head.”
“I think she’d aim for the kneecaps,” Seth said. “Except she wouldn’t. I’ve seen her climb on ladders just to capture a scary spider and set it free. I don’t think she has it in her.”
“Yeah, well, I wish she did,” Zach said, taking a third shot.
“OK, slow down. This was expensive.”
Zach glared at him. “But I bought it.”
Seth smiled. “As a gift. Mind your manners.”
They talked. Zach wasn’t sure how long. He hadn’t eaten all day, so all those shots went right to his reasoning. But after Seth heard him tell his side of the story, which he knew didn’t cast him in a better light than whatever Camila said, he gave him some advice.
“I think it would be a good idea for you to take a few days apart and then talk when you’ve both calmed down. I know Jim pretty well. I think she’d listen. She’s not going to block your number or anything. Hell, Era said to uninvite you from the wedding and Camila said no, that she didn’t want to be on bad terms with you. Just give her time.”
“I don’t think I deserve her time,” Zach said.
Seth patted him on the shoulder. “I don’t think people deserve people,” Seth said. “That makes human beings sound like a prize to be won.”
“So what are people, to you?”
Seth gave him another pat on the shoulder. “They’re just who is playing on your team. If you let them.”
* * *
“Thanks for letting me reschedule for sooner,” Camila said to Miranda. She set her bag down in its usual spot and grabbed the squishy ball she liked to play with when she hadn’t brought knitting. She gave it a squeeze but felt like she didn’t deserve the squishy, so she put it back in its basket.
“I’m happy we could work it out,” Miranda said gently. Miranda must have been alarmed by what she saw. Camila was in sweatpants in public. Her hair was in a messy pineapple, she didn’t have her brows on, and she had the telltale red pinpricks she got from intense crying bouts. She looked like shit. She felt like shit on the bottom of a more respectable person’s shoe, a person who did not deserve shit on their shoe. Like Zach.
She had fucked up.
“So, where do you want to start?”
What a question. She started with the lake trip and how magical it had been, then ended at storming out of Zach’s and him texting her a couple of days later.
“I don’t know if I overreacted or not,” Camila said. “It feels like he was trying to have an adult conversation with me and I just went all Rampage 2.0. I don’t know how I feel. And I don’t know what to say to him.”
Miranda was quiet longer than she usually was. That meant she wanted Camila to say more, but what was there for her to say?
“Can you please say something?”
Miranda didn’t oblige right away. “I find it curious that you called this Rampage 2.0. Why is that?”
“Because it’s the second time I’ve had a vicious, angry outburst when I felt slighted in a relationship. I mean, I didn’t destroy any property, but I was cruel. I weaponized Zach’s vulnerability against him. I made my own mind up and refused to even try to come to an understanding.”
“Let’s go back. I’m stuck on the word ‘slighted’ because it seems like a very surface word, like an understatement. When the Rampage happened, Johan ignoring you — how did that make you feel?”
“Helpless. Foolish.”
“How did Zach presenting you with the possibility of him moving away make you feel?”
“Helpless. Foolish. Angry. Confused. Abandoned.”
“Why did you say the things you said, Camila?”
“You know why.”
Nodding, Miranda said, “I think I do, but I would like you to say it.”
“Because I wasn’t about to let him abandon me. It had to be my choice.”
“And was it your choice? Is it still? If you could go back to that day and do things differently, would you?”
“I would,” she said. “I would have heard him out, I guess. It may have still ended the same way. And even if it didn’t, if we’d talked it out like adults, I’d wonder if he resented me. Or if him staying, if he chose to do so, would be out of pity.”
“Why out of pity?”
“Poor, crazy Camila and her abandonment issues,” she said bitterly.
Miranda did something she’d never done in session before. She grabbed the squishy ball. It was an odd sight, as if Miranda were the patient and Camila were the therapist. Wouldn’t that be something.
“I will say that I think it was quite shortsighted of him to make a commitment to stay here when the circumstances that could allow that weren’t clear,” Miranda said, squeezing the ball. “A better thing would have been to do what he’s trying to do now — talk every possibility through with you and explore the options.”
Camila stared at her. “God damn it.”
Miranda smiled, always benevolent.
“You want to know something pathetic?”
“I doubt I will think it’s so,” Miranda said.
“I think I’d take him back even if I knew we were going to break up in a year. It’s so undignified.”
“Why do you think you’d take him back?”
She had to think about that. “Because I think that there’s so much good there, I’d want to find a way to get past the bad. Because if I understood the bad, maybe I could hold space for it.”
“You’ve had some practice. You’ve held space for your own darkness.”
“Yeah,” Camila said. “I guess I have.”
“And what would be undignified about that?”
Camila had to think about this, because it just seemed like it would be. She’d put up with things she should have known were red flags in her relationship with Johan, and lord knows Liam had ignored some red flags about her.
“I guess,” she started, “it would feel undignified because it feels stupid to love someone that much.”
“How much?” Miranda asked.
“Enough to know that there was so much pain coming, and you would still choose everything leading up to it.”
“Camila,” Miranda soothed. “You cannot plan for pain. You can only know you are strong enough for when pain does come, because we can never avoid pain completely.”
Camila rarely cried in therapy, but the tears were flowing now.
Zach had loved her enough to risk the pain, and she knew that wasn’t easy for him, either.
She knew she didn’t have to endure mistreatment or neglect from people. She had boundaries. Understandable ones. Good ones.
But it was possible she’d built some that were just to avoid anything that made her dig through her box of feelings.
Camila had always thought that she was bad, crazed, irrevocably broken, and that loving someone would always bring out the worst in her. But maybe it wasn’t love that brought out her worst. Maybe it was just fear.
She deserved to feel everything. The tenderness and friendship, the excitement, the fire. A weaker girl might not have been able to handle it. But she wasn’t a weak girl anymore.