Happy Place(78)

The tracks of our lives split little by little, but the moments we’re together, my love still feels so big and violent it could consume me.

Every once in a while, Wyn asks if I want to look at venues or go sample cakes. He tries to be happy. I try to be enough in this small, small life I’ve pulled him into.

“There’s no rush,” I promise. “I’m so busy at the hospital anyway.”

I don’t want to make him celebrate. I don’t want him to feel like he has to be happy when he’s still acclimating to a world without Hank Connor in it.

It shouldn’t have happened like this. Hank was eleven years older than Gloria, sure, but he was still only in his early seventies. And aren’t seventies supposed to be like fifties now?

Sometimes we eat dinner together between his shifts. But most nights, we don’t see each other until he comes to kiss me on the head while I read in bed, before taking his shower.

Sometimes when he comes back, and he thinks I’m asleep, he’ll finally let himself cry, and I think, though I don’t know to whom or what, Please, please help. Please help him stop hurting this much.

I’ll make bargains with the universe: If I make the apartment cozier. If I don’t complain about work. If I make the most of the constant rain. If I need nothing from him, he’ll be okay.

We’ll get through this.

One night, some of the other interns invite me out. They always do. I never go. But lately Wyn has been pushing me to.

“I won’t be home anyway,” he says. “You need to have friends.”

“I have friends,” I say.

“Not here,” he says. “You need those too.”

So I go out, and it’s nice, fun, but I lose track of time, and when I get home, Wyn’s asleep in our bed, and it breaks my heart to have missed even five waking minutes with him.

I feel guilty. I feel lost. I don’t know how to fix any of it.

The next morning, when I tell him I missed him, he says, “Honestly, I crashed as soon as I got home. I wouldn’t have been any fun.”

After that, I go out a couple of times a week with Taye, the fourth-year who’s taken me in like the hospital’s own feral cat, along with a couple of other first-years she’s unofficially mentoring, Grace and Martin. And it’s nice to have friends again, to not be so alone.

Finally, when Wyn has a full night off, he comes out to meet us at the bar down the street from the hospital, and I’m excited and nervous and a little regretful that we’re spending our night out instead of at home together, but he insists it’s important.

Martin, Grace, and Taye spend the whole night talking about the hospital, or else their worst professors in medical school. It’s the first time I realize it’s all we ever really talk about, and only because I watch Wyn zone out, recede, and I have no idea how to hold on to him, keep him here with me.

Then Martin finally asks Wyn what he does for a living, and Wyn tells him about the upholstery.

“What kind of degree do you need for that?” Martin says. I don’t think he means for it to sound snotty, but it does, and Wyn reacts exactly how he always does to any suggestion of inferiority.

He leans into it. Jokes that he got a degree in chairs, but it took him an extra year, and everyone laughs it off, but for days after that, he seems even more distant.

My heart is screaming You, you, you, as if I’m watching him fall into a pit, and yet I’m immobilized, unable to find a way to reach him.

Whenever I ask him what’s wrong, he takes my face in his hands and kisses my forehead, tells me soberly, “You’re perfect,” and we forget, for a while, about everything except each other’s mouths and skin, and only later, while he lies curled around me like a question mark in bed, do I realize he hasn’t given me an answer.

Then comes Gloria’s fall. Her Parkinson’s diagnosis, or rather she admits she’s had it for years. Things have progressed more quickly since Hank’s passing.

“I’m old!” she says with a flippant hand wave when we video call her. “If Hank and I had started having kids sooner, I’d still be running all around, but we didn’t, and things are bound to start breaking down.”

She isn’t old. Older than my parents, sure, but not old enough for Wyn and Michael and Lou to have to contemplate losing their mother when they’ve only just said goodbye to their father.

Martin helps me wrangle a few days off from the hospital, and Wyn and I go to Montana, all three of Gloria’s kids and her soon-to-be-daughter-in-law crowded into their squat little house at the end of its long drive. Wyn comes alive. He lights up, loosens.

And for the second time, I tuck myself into their tiny second-floor bathroom with the water running and sob into my knuckles, because I know I can’t take him back to San Francisco.

Know I can’t bear to be the person who takes him away from where he belongs.

When I tell him I think he should stay while his mom recovers from her fall, he studies me for a long time. “Are you sure?”

“One hundred percent,” I say.

We agree he’ll stick around for a month while he, Michael, and Lou work out a long-term plan.

I fly home alone. As soon as I step foot in the apartment, I feel the shift.

Somehow I know he will never live there again.

At first we talk all the time. Then we get busy. He’s catching up on the repair work that his dad hadn’t had the chance to finish. I’m exhausted from grueling days of scrubbing in and out to stand behind a ring of scrubbed-in surgeons and residents so thick I’m lucky if I get a glance at a scalpel. And when my intern friends bemoan that same experience over drinks, I pretend to agree when the truth is, even being tasked with a suture sounds like too much right now.