How to End a Love Story(8)
The problem for Grant has never been beginnings. It’s that none of his relationships ever seem to survive a second act. Dating him, living with him, loving him becomes too sad, he needs you too much, and he always seems to be attracted to beautiful, complicated women who are smart enough to eventually recognize it’s not their responsibility to fix him, though they truly hope he heals someday.
As he brushes the taste of the failed evening out of his teeth, Grant wonders if Helen’s told Suraya yet. He wonders how that conversation would go.
Do you know you’ve employed a murderer?
Suraya would gasp, she’d assure Helen she had no idea, she’d call Grant’s agency and salt the earth with them for putting her in such a terrible position without disclosing it. He’d be dropped and unemployed not just on this show but for good, and everyone he’s ever worked with would whisper, We knew it, we knew there was something wrong with him, we all sensed it.
He knows he’s catastrophizing, that it’s technically unhealthy, but somehow it makes him feel better. Imagining his past finally catching up to him, the day he’s been dreading for so long finally here at last. He cycles through all possible worst-case scenarios until he reaches the oldest of his most suppressed thoughts, buried deep under years of therapy and friends’ reassurances he doesn’t believe nearly as much as the truth—he could have stopped it from happening, if he’d only hit the brakes faster, if he’d been paying more attention.
Grant knows he’s right to feel guilty, that he should probably feel a little guilty forever—and it’s not such a terrible price to pay, in the relative balance of things.
He should have apologized to Helen when he had the chance. He would have if he’d been in his right mind. He thinks maybe if he apologizes to her, he can salvage this. He decides he’ll email her tomorrow.
This calms him enough to fall asleep, his last thought a hazy memory of Helen Zhang staring at him with coolly demanding eyes, first as a teenager, then as an adult, telling him firmly each time what he’s always secretly known—that his presence isn’t wanted, that he should leave before he offends everyone even more.
I know, he tells Helen in his dream-memory. When will you stop reminding me?
Helen can’t sleep, so she gets out of bed and does what she always does when she can’t sleep and doesn’t love herself enough to stop. She retrieves her suitcase from under the bed, unzips an inner compartment, and pulls out an old (haunted, her teenage self always adds) hard drive. She plugs the haunted hard drive into her laptop and starts picking at an old emotional scab that never quite scarred over.
Files > Michelle is Working
AP Bio
AP English
Latin 2
Pre-Calculus
Phys. Ed.
Photography
World Cultures
Helen studies the files, the digital summation of her little sister’s final semester of life. She clicks through the familiar folders. Michelle kept a diary for only a few days into seventh grade before Helen had admonished her, “Why on earth would you leave a written record of evidence for Mom and Dad to find?”
Helen will never forgive her fourteen-year-old self for that.
Instead of a diary, she’s been left with a hard drive full of old essays and math assignments. Helen once had the romantic notion that it might be possible to understand her little sister better in death, that she would learn something new from the margins of Michelle’s essay fragments on Dust Bowl–era photography and the lives of the Bront? sisters.
They hadn’t been close enough to confide in each other after middle school—Helen had found her younger sister’s existence slightly embarrassing to her new friends at her new high school, and Michelle, it seemed, had decided the feeling was entirely mutual by eighth grade.
In Helen’s memory, Michelle is perpetually a surly teenage girl slipping behind the door of her cave-like bedroom, which always smelled vaguely of overripe fruit, in a towering mood across the hall over some perceived injustice enacted by her family, her teachers, or the world.
Secretly, Helen always hoped she’d eventually make the discovery of a lifetime in her archeological tours of her sister’s old hard drive—something that would unlock the mystery of Michelle’s last few years, in Michelle’s own words: an early outline of a novel perhaps, or sketches of original poems, or even a half-finished draft of a suicide letter.
But nothing ever materialized and Helen abandoned the effort as a profoundly stupid version of self-harm that she was too smart to engage with. So smart, in fact, she wrote this search for lost letters into her own books—her books about brilliant, academic teens on the quest for long-lost academic secrets, in the wake of a tragic car accident that took the life of the protagonist’s little sister. And those books are getting turned into a TV show, Helen reminds herself. She has spun this particular personal wound into gold many times over and it’s time to let it go, its purpose as grist for the creative mill long since fulfilled.
Find a new emotional scab to pick—this is boring, Helen admonishes herself. Tell a new story.
But still, she sits in front of her laptop, and she clicks.
Maybe there’ll be something she missed in the next folder.
Four
“I like your name,” the hostess says as she flashes Grant Shepard a smile across the check-in stand.