How to End a Love Story(96)
The next day, he leases a fuel-efficient SUV he’s been contemplating purchasing for a while and puts his convertible up for sale on a used-car group. He packs a week’s worth of clothes and realizes Helen still has his favorite T-shirt. He decides she can keep that souvenir.
He opts for the faster, slightly less scenic route that takes him through the red rocks of Arizona and reminds him of Saturday-morning cartoons, watching the Road Runner meep meep through desert landscapes and roads that seem to stretch for infinity.
He sees the signs for the Grand Canyon and impulsively makes a detour, because he can’t remember the last time he saw it with his own eyes. He buys a disposable camera at a gas station and has a mental image of himself asking random strangers to take his solo photo at the Grand Canyon, and them looking at him with pity. They don’t know I was homecoming king in ’08, he thinks, and laughs to himself.
He forgets the camera in his car when he gets there, but it doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t think photos would do the scene justice anyway. He sits on a craggy rock and stares out at the sweeping vista, full of burnt reds and blue-purples and the slightest hints of green peppering the carved valley below him.
He decides he’ll either get over Helen by Chicago or buy a plane ticket and move to some remote island in Greece that’s accessible only by boat and build cabinets for the rest of his life.
Neither of those things happens, of course.
He thinks about calling her when he takes a wrong turn in Oklahoma and ends up driving late into the night through the flat plains of Kansas. He doesn’t, but the thought keeps him alert and awake enough to make it safely to his hotel in Wichita. Thanks, crackerjack, he thinks, and it barely even hurts that time.
He gets on the road early and, after ten hours of driving, reaches the apartment of Julie Swain, a college friend who moved to Chicago for the improv scene and offered up her couch when she saw him posting scenes from his cross-country trip on Instagram.
They run down the block to a convenience store so Julie can pick up some toilet paper—he thinks it’s for him and insists on paying for it, but it turns out it’s for her sketch comedy group that’s meeting tomorrow. She buys a six-pack of beers and they put on a nature documentary in the background when they get back to her living room.
“So what’s next for Grant Shepard?” she asks as he twists open a second bottle for each of them.
“Well, I was thinking about finishing this beer and then using some of that toilet paper I bought your sketch comedy troupe.”
She laughs and shoves him on the shoulder. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I know, I’m such an avoidant bastard, aren’t I?” Grant grins and sips from the glass bottle. “No, I have stuff lined up. This big Netflix thing I signed so many NDAs for I may have sold them my left nipple somewhere in the mix. And then after that, I don’t know. Something’ll come up.”
“That’s great,” she says, and their shoulders touch lightly.
He thinks maybe there’s a world where something could have happened between them once, back in college. But enough time has passed and they’ve settled into something easier and more comfortable—the companionship of old friends. He wonders if enough time will ever pass for him to have a conversation like this with Helen.
“What’s up?” she asks, looking sideways at him. “You’re, like, a million miles away.”
“Nothing,” he says, then thinks better of it. “Can I ask a weird favor?”
She nods, and maybe it’s the beer, but he plows ahead: “Can I borrow your phone to make a call, and if they call you back tomorrow, just say it was a wrong number or try to sell them car insurance or something?”
Julie stares at him for a beat, and he detects a pitying note when she silently pulls out her phone and hands it to him.
He takes the stairs up to the roof to make the call, even though it’s still cold enough in late March for there to be puddles of melting snow up there. He knows Helen doesn’t answer unknown numbers, so he’s surprised when he hears a laughing “Hello? Shhh—I’m on the phone! Hello?”
He swallows hard and listens to the sound of music—“cooking with friends,” probably—and her breathing in the background. He stands there for what feels like forever, stupidly grateful to hear her existing at the same time as him, before the phone clicks and she hangs up.
His call log tells him the call was four seconds long.
Helen hangs up, and there’s a funny feeling at the back of her neck when she sets her phone down.
“Must’ve been a wrong number,” she tells Nicole.
Defying all expectations, her parents left LA the day after Helen got out of the hospital. She hasn’t called them since, and they haven’t called her. It’s been almost five weeks. She isn’t sure what to make of the silence and she gets an uncomfortable feeling of shame and guilt in her stomach when she thinks about it too much—like she did whenever she made a messy spill as a kid and tried to hide the results from her parents.
She hasn’t heard from Grant either, not since the writers room officially ended and there was no reason to look forward to seeing his name in her inbox every day, even if it was just on a distro list for the daily prep schedule. She hasn’t talked to him since that day in the pink hospital room and her heart still speeds up just thinking about it.