At first, Lizzie had been supportive, staying close to his bedside in the hospital, hovering around him at home. But the longer he lived in the darkness, the more restless his wife became.
‘You have situational depression,’ she kept asserting, flicking through websites on her iPad, presenting little facts to her husband each night. ‘It says here that situational depression is common in men who’—and off she would go, reading aloud from this magazine article or that, hunting down expert opinions on why, after leaving the hospital, Josh remained reluctant to get back to his old life, his old self. Trying to resolve why he was suddenly a blank slate, why none of the usual things impressed upon him or moved him and, why—a fact most alarming to anyone who knew how kinetic he had been before the accident—this new state of being did not seem to panic him, no matter how many long days and longer nights had passed.
It took Lizzie six months to leave him. She’s been out in LA for over a year now, writing for a TV show. At first, she held out hope the old Josh would come back.
‘We’ll get you a shaman,’ she had said, around two months after settling on the West Coast. ‘They can go so much deeper than the others. Down to where you’ve gone.’ She sent him meditational videos and links to yoga retreats in Bali. Things to bring him back to her, to the indulgent rhythms of their relationship before he decided to bike home through Central Park one night and his wheel hit a tree root, and everything got rearranged. She missed their rooftop parties, and their drug-hazed fucking, and seeing her husband’s name as a byline in her favourite magazines. But, eventually, her love ran out. Just a little, and then a lot, as if it had only ever come from a limited supply.
Lizzie has long since stopped talking about smudge sticks and heal-all desert plants, and now her emails and texts reference divorce papers, and selling the apartment on East 97th. He has been avoiding this next step, he tells Ruby, not because he wants to work on the marriage. Rather, he has been happy for things to stay just as they are. Afraid, he admits now, of what another change might bring.
‘Things changed the wrong way.’
‘I understand,’ Ruby tells him. ‘I really do.’
She thinks of something she learned when she was very young, growing up on the edge of a wild, open ocean. When you get caught in a rip, you have no choice but to give in, to go where the water wants to take you. The force of the rip will eventually dissipate, but only if you let it carry you far enough out to sea. Safety comes from moving with the current until you are free of it, and then, only then, can you turn and swim like hell for the shore.
Ruby knows how to navigate the natural phenomena that is a changeable ocean. Why should it be any different with a natural disaster like love, she asks Josh. No one ever ends up where they started from, but you do make it home, when the time is right. If you have kept your head while being tossed about.
Sometimes it is surrender, not struggle, that saves a life.
Ruby does not call Ash. He is the one to text her, says he heard a rumour at work suggesting she helped solve a major crime.
Holy shit Jonesy, what an adventure! I can’t wait to talk to you about it. In NYC, maybe :）
She knows he means no harm with this cavalier response, but she also wonders when Ash will ever take her seriously. Knowing the answer is implicit in the question. He does not want her to be serious. She is his escape from serious. And this is a part of their bargain she can no longer uphold. Now that the something she has wanted to happen has so thoroughly happened. Now that she is unsure whether she is the same woman who said yes to Ash after she knew he was engaged. That version of herself seems irreconcilable with the strong, capable Ruby who sat in front of Detective O’Byrne and detailed her encounters with the man who killed Alice Lee, offering up enough perceptive information that she will be considered, in the looking back on this crime, to be the steady hand that turned a complex murder investigation toward its conclusion.
This is not a woman Ash has ever known.
This is the woman she wants to be.
I don’t want you to come here, Ash, she eventually responds. You should commit to your fiancée. You’ve made your choice and I don’t want to keep you from it. Go get married. Time for us to let go.
Ruby stares at the ceiling for a full hour after sending this text. They say it’s the truth that sets you free. But sometimes it’s a lie that does it. There is no reply. Ash will not reply. She lets herself wallow one last time, aches over the images she has crafted of them together in New York. Tastes daydreams of dark bars and glittering rooftops, rolls them around on her tongue, feels the tang of her yearning for him in her mouth. Swallows. There was a life she did not get to live. It was so close, but she cannot continue to hold onto something already gone.