Maybe in Another Life (29 page)

I don’t move.

“Or later, I guess.”

Gabby looks at him sideways.

“You should be able to rest down on it to sit and then swing your legs over, as opposed to having to use your pelvis to sit or stand.”

“Mark, what is going on?” Gabby asks.

“I bought a two-way pager system, so if you’re in bed, you can just talk into it, and Gabby will know to come get you. And the dining-room table was too high, so this morning I had one delivered that is lower to the ground so your chair can reach.”

Gabby whips her head around the corner, surprised. “You did that this morning? Where did our table go?”

Mark breathes in. “Hannah, could you give us a minute? Maybe you could confirm that your bed is the right height?”

“Mark, what the hell is going on?” Gabby’s voice is tight and rigid. There is no bend in it, no patience.

“Hannah,” he pleads.

“OK,” I say, and I start wheeling myself away.

“No!” Gabby says, losing her patience. “She can barely move herself from place to place. Don’t ask her to leave the room.”

“It’s fine, really,” I say, but just as I say it, Mark blurts it out.

“I’m leaving,” he says. He looks at the ground when he says it.

“To go where?” Gabby asks.

“I mean I’m leaving you,” he says.

She goes from confused to stunned, as if she’s been slapped across the face. Her jaw goes slack, her eyes open wide, her head shakes subtly from side to side, as if incapable of processing what she’s hearing.

He fills in the gaps for her. “I’ve met someone. And I believe she is the one for me. And I’m leaving. I’ve left you with everything you two could need. Hannah is taken care of. I’m leaving you the house and most of the furniture. Louis Grant is drafting the paperwork.”

“You called our attorney before you talked to me?”

“I was just asking him for a referral when he explained he could do it himself. I didn’t mean to go behind your back.”

She starts laughing. I knew she was going to start laughing when he said that. I wonder if the second it came out of his mouth, he thought,
Oh, crap, I shouldn’t have said that
. I want to wheel out of the room very badly, but I also know that my wheelchair squeaks, and we are three people in one room. If one of us leaves, the other two are going to notice. And I’m not even sure they are registering that I’m here. I don’t want to bring attention to the fact that I’m here by not being here anymore.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But I’m not. We should talk about this in a few days, when you’ve had time to adjust to the information. I’m truly sorry to hurt you. It was never my intention. But I am in love with someone else, and it no longer seems fair to keep going the way we have been.”

“What am I missing?” she asks. “We were talking about having a baby.”

Mark shakes his head. “That was a . . . that was wrong of me. I was . . . pretending to be someone I’m not. I have made mistakes, Gabrielle, and I am now trying to fix them.”

“Leaving me is fixing your mistakes?”

“I think we should talk about this at a later date. For now, I have moved my clothes and other things to my new place.”

“Did you take my dining-room table?”

“I wanted to make sure you and Hannah had what you needed, so I took the table to my new home and bought you both a table that would work better for Hannah’s situation.”

“She’s not an invalid, Mark. She’s going to be walking eventually. I want my table back.”

“I did what I thought was best. I think I should go now.”

She stares at him for what feels like hours but is probably only thirty seconds. And then she erupts like I have never seen her before.

“Get out of my house!” she screams. “Get out of here! Get away from me!”

He heads for the door.

“I never should have married you,” she says, and you can tell she means it. She deeply, deeply means it. She doesn’t say it as if it’s just occurring to her or as if she wants to hurt his feelings. She says it as if she is heartbroken that her worst fears came true right in front of her very eyes.

He doesn’t look back at her. He just walks out the door, leaving it open behind him. It strikes me as cruel, that small gesture. He could have shut the door behind him. It’s almost instinctual, isn’t it? To shut the door behind you? But he didn’t. He let it hang open, forcing her to close it.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she crumples to the ground, yelling from the base of her lungs. It’s throaty and deep, a grunt more than a scream. “I hate you!”

And then she looks up at me, remembering that I am here.

She gathers herself as best she can, but I wouldn’t say she succeeds. Tears are falling down her face, her nose is running, her mouth is open and overflowing. “Will you get his key?” she says. She whispers it, but even in attempting to whisper, she cannot control the edges of her voice.

I spring into action. I wheel myself out the front door and down the ramp. He’s getting into the car.

“The key,” I say. “Your key, to the house.”

“It’s on the coffee table,” he says. “With the deed. I signed over the townhouse,” he says, as if it is a secret he has been waiting to tell, like a student excited to tell the teacher he did the extra credit.

“OK,” I say, and then I turn my chair around and head back toward the front door.

“I want her to be OK,” he says. “That’s why I gave her the house.”

“OK, Mark,” I say.

“It’s worth a lot of money,” he says. “The equity in the townhouse, I mean. My parents helped us with the down payment, and I’m giving it to her.”

I turn the chair around. “What do you want me to say, Mark? Do you want a gold medal?”

“I want her to understand that I’m doing everything in my power to make this easier on her. That I care about her. You get it, don’t you?”

“Get what?”

“That love makes you do crazy things, that sometimes you have to do things that seem wrong from the outside but you know are right. I thought you’d understand. Given what Gabby told me happened between you and Michael.”

If I hadn’t just been in a car accident where I almost lost my life, maybe I’d be hurt by something as small as a sentence. If I hadn’t spent the past week learning how to stand up on my own and use a wheelchair, maybe I’d let myself fall for this sort of crap. But Mark has the wrong idea about me. I’m no longer a
person willing to pretend the things I’ve done wrong are justifiable because of how they make me feel.

I made a mistake. And that mistake is part of what has led me to this moment. And while I neither regret nor condone what I did, I have learned from it. I have grown since. And I’m different now.

You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again. And I know I’ll never make that mistake again. So I let his words rush past me and off into the wind.

“Just go, Mark,” I tell him. “I’ll let her know the house is hers.”

“I never meant to hurt her.” He opens his car door.

“OK,” I say, and I turn away from him. I roll myself up the ramp. I hear his car leave the street. I’m not going to tell her any of that. She can see the deed to the townhouse on her own and form an opinion about it. I’m not going to try to tell her he didn’t mean to hurt her. That’s absurd and meaningless.

It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. Because regardless of our destiny, we still have to answer for our actions. We make choices, big and small, every day of our lives, and those choices have consequences.

We have to face those consequences head-on, for better or worse. We don’t get to erase them just by saying we didn’t mean to. Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices. I’m starting to think that when we don’t own them, we don’t own ourselves.

I roll back into the house and see Gabby, still lying on the
floor, nearly catatonic. She’s staring at the ceiling. Her tears spill from her face and form tiny puddles on the floor.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever felt pain like this,” she says. “And I think I’m still in shock. It’s only going to get worse, right? It’s only going to get deeper and sharper, and it’s already so deep and so sharp.”

For the first time in what feels like a long time, I’m higher up than Gabby. I have to look down to meet her eyeline. “You won’t have to go through it alone,” I tell her. “I’ll be here through every part of it. I’d do anything for you, do you know that? Does it help? To know that I’d move mountains for you? That I’d part seas?”

She looks up at me.

I move one foot onto the ground and lean over. I try to get my hands onto the floor in front of me.

“Hannah, stop,” she says as I push my center of gravity closer to her, trying to lie down next to her. But I don’t have the mechanics right. I don’t have the right strength just yet. I topple over. It hurts. It actually hurts quite a bit. But I have pain medication in my bag and things to do. So I move through it. I scoot next to her, pushing the wheelchair out of the way.

“I love you,” I tell her. “And I believe in you. I believe in Gabby Hudson. I believe she can do anything.”

She looks at me with gratitude, and then she keeps crying. “I’m so embarrassed,” she says between breaths. She’s about to start hyperventilating.

“Shhh. There’s no reason to be embarrassed. I can’t go to the bathroom on my own. So you have no right to claim embarrassment,” I tell her.

She laughs, if only for the smallest, infinitesimal second, and then she starts crying again. To hear it makes my heart ache.

“Squeeze my hand,” I tell her as I take her hand in mine. “When it hurts so bad you don’t think you can stand it, squeeze my hand.”

She starts crying again, and she squeezes.

And at that moment, I realize that if I have taken away a fraction of her pain, then I have more purpose than I have ever known.

I’m not moving to London. I’m staying right here.

I found my home. And it’s not New York or Seattle or London or even Los Angeles.

It’s Gabby.

T
hat night, Gabby and I decide to take Charlemagne for a long walk. At first, we were just going to walk around the block, but Gabby suggests getting out of the neighborhood. So we get into the car and drive to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Gabby says it’s beautiful at night. There is a light installation that shines brightly in the dark. She wants to show me.

We stop at Coffee Bean and get tea lattes. Mine is herbal because Gabby read an article that said pregnant women shouldn’t have any caffeine. There are about ten others that say caffeine is fine in moderation but Gabby is very persuasive.

We park the car a few blocks from the museum, put Charlemagne on the sidewalk, and start walking. The air is cool; the sun set early tonight, and it’s quiet on the streets of L.A., even for a Sunday night.

Gabby doesn’t want to talk about Mark, and I don’t really want to talk about the baby. Lately, it seems as if all we do is talk about Mark and the baby. So we decide instead to talk about high school.

“Freshman year, you had a crush on Will Underwood,” Gabby says. She sips her drink right after she says it, and I look at her to see her eyes giving a mischievous glance. It’s true, I did have a crush on Will Underwood. But she also knows that just mentioning it is enough to make me
mortified. During our freshman year, Will Underwood was a senior who was completely cheesy and dated freshman girls. When you are a freshman girl, you don’t understand what’s so unlikable about guys who are interested in freshman girls. Instead, I very much hoped he’d notice me. I wanted to be one of those girls. He’s now a shock jock on an FM station here. He dates strippers.

“Well, I’ve never had good taste,” I say, laughing at myself, and then I point at my belly. “As evidenced here by my baby with no daddy.”

Gabby laughs. “Ethan was a good one,” she says. “You were smart enough to choose Ethan.”

“Twice,” I remind her as we keep walking. Charlemagne pulls on the leash, leading us toward a tree. We stop.

“Well, I’m no better at choosing, clearly,” Gabby says, and it occurs to me that when you’re going through a divorce or when you’re having a baby, there is no not talking about it. It shades everything you do. You have to talk about it, even when you aren’t talking about it. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe what’s important is that you have someone to listen.

Charlemagne pees beside the tree and then starts scratching away at the grass, trying to cover it up. This is a pet peeve of Gabby’s, because Gabby appreciates a nicely landscaped curb.

“Charlemagne, no,” Gabby says. Charlemagne stops and looks up at her, hoping to please. “Good girl,” Gabby says, and then she looks at me. “She’s so smart. Did you think dogs were this smart?”

I laugh at her. “She’s not that smart,” I tell her. “Earlier today, she ran into the wall. You just love her, so you think she’s smart. Rose-colored glasses and what have you.”

Gabby cocks her head to the side and looks at Charlemagne. “No,” she says. “She’s
really smart. I just know it. I can tell. I mean, yes, I do love her. I love her to pieces. I honestly don’t know what I was doing without a dog this whole time. Mark ruined all the good stuff.”

Obviously, Mark didn’t actually ruin every good thing in the world, but I don’t contradict her. Anger is a part of healing. “Yeah,” I say. “Well, actually, you did have good taste in men once. Remember how in love you were with Jesse Flint all through high school? And then senior year? You guys went out on the one date?”

“Oh, my God!” Gabby says. “Jesse Flint! I could never forget Jesse Flint! He was an actual dream man. I still think he’s the most handsome guy I’ve ever seen in my life.”

I laugh at her. “Oh, come on! He was tiny. I don’t even know if he was taller than you.”

She nods. “Oh, yes, he was. He was one inch taller than me and perfect. And then stupid Jessica Campos got back together with him the day after our date, and they ended up getting married after college. The major tragedy of my young life.”