“I didn’t tell you in the beginning,” I say, trying to put all of these things in order. Trying to make sense of them.
“No. You really didn’t tell me anything about your past. I think… I didn’t much think about that because I was so young. My past… It barely existed.”
“I wouldn’t have told you,” he says. “Even if you had asked.”
“When you told me, you did it to hurt me. Not to help us get closer. You thought that it would shock me.”
“Did it?”
“Yes.”
She walks over to me, and very slowly lifts her hand, and places it on my face. I feel instantly calm. And yet again I understand entirely what happened to me when I met her. But looking at her right now I cannot understand what drew her to me. I am nothing but a shell. A hollow man filled with memories of her and trauma. Why would a young woman with so much ahead of her tie herself to me?
I put my hand over the top of hers. Scarred and tattooed, and I find it so ugly. She is so soft. So untouched by this world. I am the pain that she has experienced.
“Why did you want me?”
“I told you,” she says. But then tears fill her eyes and she turns away from me. “I’m sorry about what I said last night.”
“Which thing?”
“That what we feel for each other is common. It’s not. If it were common then I would’ve felt it before. If it were common then I wouldn’t have filled canvases with paintings of you. I guess, maybe it is common, but it doesn’t make it any less powerful. It is the thing that drives people. It’s what makes us all do things that we regret. Things that hurt ourselves, things that hurt the other. Lust is a powerful force.”
“And that’s what’s between us?”
“I don’t think it’s only that. I’d like it to be. There is a Bible verse about love. Do you know it?”
“I did not know my own name yesterday,” I say.
“Well, I thought it was a long shot, but still. It talks about all the things that love is. Patient and kind. That isn’t us. I struggled with that. Because I learned that verse when I was a child. And I knew we weren’t that from the beginning. But I thought maybe we were something that burned brighter than people who lived normal lives could ever understand. I thought maybe we were special. And now I don’t know.”
“We can not know together.”
I despise the fact that memory has introduced doubt. She is not wrong, though. I already know that nothing about the thing between us was patient or kind. It was greedy and insatiable.
It has been from the beginning.
She makes more coffee, and then makes a cup for me, putting cream and a very specific amount of sugar in it. I like it, and I marvel at the fact she knows this about me, and I don’t.
“You’re going to have to sleep eventually,” she says.
“I don’t need very much sleep.”
I have practiced going days at a time without sleep. I trained to be able to do that. I know it then, as certain as I know anything else.
These memories, they don’t come in a way that’s rational. It’s like I get the core first, and then the external layers begin to wrap themselves around it. A feeling, followed by an image and a reason.
We sit together at the island in the kitchen, the only sound our cups occasionally making contact on the high-gloss black countertop.
I know we didn’t have many moments like this in our marriage. Based on the things that she said. And based on feelings. Things that feel right and wrong about myself. As a husband and as a man.
We were a thunderstorm, and we never managed to reach the eye of that hurricane.
“I need to go through the things today. The room that I found, and the box. I need to remember. Because if I don’t, we cannot leave here.”
“I can,” she says.
I shake my head. “You can’t. They knew that I had come for you. They know that you can be used against me. That is the truth of it.”
