Oof.
I absolutely got it.
I made my voice soft. “You can’t make people love you. But you can give the love you long for out to the world. You can be the love you wish you had. That’s the way to be okay. Because giving love to other people is a way of giving it to yourself.”
Wilbur chewed his lip as he thought about that.
“That’s all we can do,” I said. “All we can do is put away our anger, and our blame, and our guns”—see what I did there?—“and try to make things better instead of worse. That’s the only answer there is.”
Wilbur wiped at his tears with the back of his gun-holding hand.
I took a step closer. “Give yourself some time—and give me the gun.”
Wilbur lowered the gun and looked down at it in his hand.
“You can change your life,” I said then. “You can make good things happen. You can fill up your yard with painted birdhouses. Hundreds of them. Thousands.” My voice felt a little shaky. But I kept going: “I’d really, really love to see that. How magical would that be?”
Wilbur didn’t look away. He knew I was telling the truth. He felt how much I meant it.
“Come down and give me the gun, okay?” I said.
Wilbur looked down then, peering over his feet. Then, with surrender, he stepped back toward us, down off the ledge. As he landed, his injured leg crumpled under him, and he collapsed.
In that second, Jack and I both tackled him—Jack, still bound, throwing his whole body down to keep Wilbur pinned, and me going for the gun—though Wilbur had gone limp at that point and didn’t need much restraining.
As I landed, the wine opener in my bra flew out and went skittering across the rooftop.
I twisted Wilbur’s arm behind him and wrested the gun out of his grip, and then I looked up to see Jack staring at the corkscrew. “What, exactly, were you planning to do with that?”
But I just said, “You don’t want to know.”
Pretty easy, right there at the end.
“I was never going to kill you, you know,” Wilbur said to me then, his cheek against the roof. “Or Jack, either. The only person I wanted to murder here was me.”
“That’s gotta change, Wilbur,” I said, my knee on his back. “You need to learn how to be kind to yourself. And then you need to share that kindness with the world.”
“With birdhouses,” Wilbur said, clearly liking my idea.
“That’s one way,” I said.
We could hear the sirens now. And voices down below. And boots on the gravel drive.
Shouldn’t be long. They’d follow my bloody footprints up to us pretty fast.
While we waited, Wilbur said, “I just have one question for Jack.”
Jack, stretched across his legs to keep them pinned, said, “What is it?”
That’s when Wilbur lifted his head, angled back to give Jack his best smile, and said, “Any chance of a selfie?”
Thirty-Two
THE DOC AT the ER called the scrape on my head a “million-dollar wound.”
Bad enough, in theory, to earn me some time off work, but not bad enough to need stitches.
Or, you know, to have killed me.
“One millimeter closer,” the doc said, after letting out a long whistle, “and it would be a whole different story.”
Once they cleaned me up and got a good look, it was like a two-inch-long, pencil-lead-wide trench above my ear—with the sides built up a tiny bit, like a berm.
Jack took a bunch of photos with my phone so I could see.
They didn’t have to shave too much of my hair, which was nice. Just pulled the bulk off into a surprisingly perky side ponytail. Then they irrigated and disinfected it, packed it with an antibacterial ointment, and covered it with a dressing—encircling my head with gauze like the sweatband of a 1970s tennis player.
“This is actually a good look for you,” Jack said.
I just kept thinking it could’ve been so much worse.
They didn’t even keep me overnight. Once the MRI came back fine, they discharged me with some antibiotics, industrial-strength Tylenol, and strict instructions to “treat it like a concussion.” No driving, no sports, no roller coasters.
Check.
Jack and I had arrived at the ER in an ambulance, and so Glenn sent a car later to pick us up. And in a classic, Glenn Schultz–style sadistic flourish, he made Robby drive it.
Do we need to review all the times Robby said there was no way I could ever pass for Jack Stapleton’s girlfriend? Do we need to reflect on Robby’s astonishing callousness from the breakup and beyond? Do we need to have a moment of realization here that Robby’s strategy for keeping me in a bad relationship was to convince me that I didn’t deserve a better one?