Page 79 of Night Songs

“Like this.” I gestured at the distance between our bodies.

“I know,” he said, meeting my eyes. “I was trying to give you space. I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“I did, but—” I took a deep breath. “It’s been hard for me to talk to you because I feel like you don’t want to hear what I have to say.”

“Of course I want to hear—”

“Even if it seems toxic and fatalistic to you?”

He exhaled. “I’m not saying you can’t have those kind of thoughts, just that it’s not good to dwell on them. What is the point?”

“Sometimes I can’t help it. Sometimes I think there is something wrong with me, and as much as I don’t want to and would like to be a different person, I can’t not think it. That’s just how my mind works.”

He nodded slowly, contemplating.

“And I feel so bad about it, and I keep it bottled up because you don’t want to hear it, and it’s easier to just not say anything than make up something inane to say instead.”

He kept nodding. “Okay. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to—I just.” He sighed. “I think about my brother and how he used to wallow in all these terrible, negative thoughts, and he would get in this really bad place, and eventually, you know, he just couldn’t take it, and it scares me to think—”

“I’m not your brother,” I cut in before he could take it there.

“I know.”

“I can have negative thoughts, and everything will still be okay.”

“I believe you.” He folded his hands on the table and looked up at me. “All right. I’m ready to listen now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Please. I want to know.” His eyes sparkled with genuine interest, and I remembered why I’d first fallen in love with him.

So I told him what I’d been holding back the past few months—my fear that something was inherently wrong with me, or that I was being punished, or that the universe knew something I didn’t, that I wasn’t meant to have a child.

I didn’t tell him everything in my head because some of it was only for me.

But he listened this time and didn’t cut me off. I told him I wanted to find our way back to each other, to the closeness we had when we’d carried our home on our backs.

If our family together was only me and him, then I was okay with that. It was so much more than I had ever had before I met him, when I was just an angry, lonely teenager. I would no longer organize my life around this void at the center of it, and I would stop punishing myself for whatever sins, real or imagined, that may have led me here.

I wanted to live again.

27lulabelle

1976

SIX YEARS LEFT

For the next few weeks, it felt like the grief was transforming my body.

Every morning I woke to waves of sickness, brought on by the memory of what had happened to Tate. I could barely eat, and when I did, I couldn’t keep it down. I was exhausted, and I spent days on end in bed. Various bowls and casserole dishes surrounded the mattress from people who had come by to take care of me, and when I couldn’t bear to leave the room, I peed in these and left them on the floor.

I’m not sure how long this went on. But one morning I woke up and felt better.

In fact, I felt wonderful. I walked stiffly into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I’d lost weight from my convalescence, but somehow my boobs had grown. My complexion was milky and mixed with light. Mourning had endowed me with a tragic beauty. I was radiant with grief.

But above all, I washungry. No, not hungry.Ravenous.

I called Phoebe, who was in town, and she came right over with a sack of cheeseburgers. She took one look at me and her face dropped. “Dear God.”