Page 64 of Only and Forever

I want to stop holding myself back for fear of the unknown. I want to trust that what comes will come, and I’ll make it out on the other side, no matter what. I want to open my heart wide, my arms, too, and wrap them around this enigma of a woman.

Tallulah walks toward me, eyes holding mine. The kittens prance toward her, meowing, rubbing against her ankles, hopping over her boots.

“Hey, you,” I tell her, searching her eyes for some clue as to how she is.

She doesn’t smile. But her eyes are bright, glowing like embers about to burst back to life, into a full-blown fire. “Five. Kittens.”

I grin. “This is what happens when you leave. I get lonely.”

Her mouth twitches, the faintest hint of a smile. She rolls her eyes. “Let me guess.” She turns, shrugging off her jacket, sliding it down her arms as she walks toward the hall leading to her room. “You named them for peers of the realm.”

My eyes widen. “Hot damn, Lula. Now,there’san idea!”

EIGHTEEN

Tallulah

Playlist: “Singin’ My Soul,” Gin Wigmore

I take a long hot shower that turns my skin pink. I wash off two days of grime and grit.

And then I put on my softest, comfiest clothes, not a stitch of makeup. My hair is wet, dripping on my shoulders, as I walk down the hall into the main living space.

Viggo sits in his rocker, swaying steadily, back and forth, headphones on, knitting needles clacking. The dogs lie at his feet on their side, dozing. They’re unfazed by the kittens that paw around them, swatting at their tails, hopping over them to pounce on Viggo’s yarn.

My heart clutches.

Two days. I spent two days driving, burning gas, crashing at filthy motels just long enough to sleep a few hours so I could keep riding safely. I rode for two days, processing the conversation that followed after I saw my mom’s text message and did what she asked:Call me please. We need to talk.

My parents’ voices on speakerphone, their words, played on a loop in my mind as I rode:

We’re divorcing. This time, we hold no hope for an eventual reconciliation.

We love each other, but we don’t love each other well.

We’ve both been working on ourselves, and that work made us see we need to go our separate ways. For good.

Dad’s moving to New York, to focus on live theater. Mom’s selling the house and moving up to Santa Barbara to live with your grandmother.

You’ll be welcome at both our places. We’ll see each other soon, at Charlie’s wedding.

We know we’ve hurt you kids, through the years, with our ups and downs, and we’re sorry. We really are.

I got on that Vespa and just kept going because I couldn’t face Charlie’s sadness, knowing I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t handle whatever destructive response Harry was going to come up with. Lying in those crappy motels, exhausted, drained, all I kept thinking was,I want to go home. After just a little over a week, when I picturedhome, it was this place. Here, with Viggo.

It scared the shit out of me. It still scares the shit out of me. Because I feel raw and unsure, scared and needy. My parents’ divorcing yet again isn’t what’s thrown me. It’s how they told me, what they said.

We love each other, but we don’t love each other well.

Those words are a burr stuck to the fabric of my thoughts. The past two days, I’ve tried to tug them off, but the harder I tried to disentangle myself from their impact, the more those words snagged and tore through me, until I unraveled, until I was left with a rip right down the middle of my conviction that what I know to be trueistrue.

Maybe the truth isn’t that love is disproved by how poorly I’ve seen it born out, but that I’ve just wanted it to be. Because then I could protect myself from its complexity, its vulnerability. What if love is like anything else humans strive at—something you can fail at spectacularly, and, by contrast, by some mysterious, terrifying chance of sharing it with the right person, through hard work and hope, something you can also do spectacularly well?

I feel naked without my old confidence, exposed to the elementsof a wider world, a bigger picture than I’ve ever let myself see. I have never felt so in need of something, someone, to wrap around me and shield me while I stitch myself back together.

But I can’t ask that of Viggo. I won’t. Not after how far we took it, well beyond our defined boundaries, before I left. I can’t ask Viggo for any more than I already selfishly have.

I have to suck it up. Push through. Handle my struggle on my own. Like I have before. Like I will again.