Closing Facebook wasn’t enough, though. My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing afterward. Everyone who knew us both had to text me. Had to read in to my pauses and my punctuation, determining for themselves how I felt. I decided the cure for my hangover was another drink, alone this time.
Over the past four years, the moments Katrina’s existence has intruded on mine have felt like interludes. They’re lost days. I write, of course, but the content is functional, unenthusiastic, the prose equivalent of ground beef. Because every word wasn’t written out of passion or intent but out of resistance. Resistance to the terrible gravity of the question I don’t want to contemplate—whether Katrina was my real life, and everything else the interlude.
Katrina flushes pink. “It wasn’t necessary. It’s not like we were speaking,” she says, recovering her composure.
We’re perilously close to the subjects we’ve danced around in every spiteful comment and pained look. The thing is, if Katrina’s honestly happy engaged to Christopher Calloway, I’m happy for her. If noticing the ring on her finger fills her heart with light, I want nothing else. I just know what I know about Chris, and I know what I know about Katrina.
She takes off her sunglasses, folding them carefully in her hands. “I was . . . sorry to hear about you and Melissa,” she goes on. I can see in her eyes she’s doing exactly what I am. Testing herself. Finding out if we can really fake this. I imagine her receiving the same texts I did, telling her the news of my divorce. I wonder how she replied.
“Thank you. I have . . . more regrets than I care to admit,” I say haltingly. This confession is doubly difficult to make. Not only to Katrina, but to myself. There’s no easy way to break off your marriage, like there’s no easy way to break your leg, but if I could change the past, I’d still be divorced from Melissa, though there’s plenty I’d do differently. Our divorce was comedically painful, like some ugly joke the universe was playing. There were times when I almost wished one of us had cheated, just so we could push our marriage to the safe distance of hatred. I know with certainty it would’ve been preferable to watching my ex-wife sign her divorce papers, then burst into big, broken tears.
Katrina nods. She stares into the distance. “Chris doesn’t want me unless I’m a writer,” she says after a moment.
The admission pulls me forcefully from memories of Melissa. It’s unexpectedly heartbreaking. I feel an instinct I thought I no longer had to comfort her, reassure her. “Katrina . . .” I start.
She looks at me. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not, but you don’t have to say anything.” Putting on her glasses, she flags down the waiter. “Can we get the bill?” she asks with a smile. It’s fake, but what she said was real. Everything we’ve said was real.
It’s ironic, I realize. In our pretense, we’ve somehow stumbled into honesty. We’ve let ourselves share things we wouldn’t when we were our combative selves, entrenched in our present life.
I wonder where it leaves us, because this fake friendship is starting to feel unnervingly real.
18
Katrina
We’re on the couch, where we’ve wordlessly agreed we’re working today instead of the dining room. Brunch left me feeling off. I don’t know why I confessed to Nathan things I hardly concede to myself, truths whose faces I only glimpse when I’m turning over in bed every night. Hearing them out loud, they sounded ridiculous. But the way Nathan listened told me they weren’t.
I might’ve preferred feeling ridiculous.
When we got home, I pushed those insecurities to the side, knowing what scene lay ahead of us. If discussing our lives over pancakes was the warm-up, writing romance together feels like stepping into a boxing arena. We’ve avoided it long enough, though.
We drifted into the living room, Nathan carrying his computer, and eased onto the couch in front of the porch windows. It’s warm, not hot. The cushions sink welcomingly beneath me. The room is cozy, and completely incongruent with what we have to do. Nathan, next to me, is sitting legs crossed with his ankle propped on his knee.
While we write, I feel his eyes move from the screen to my hands folded in my lap. I know what he’s noticing, not for the first time. Just like I recognized Nathan was so strikingly similar to how I remembered him, he would’ve done the same. He would have seen how little I’ve changed from the Katrina he knew, despite the enormity of the upheavals in our relationship. My hair is long, my skin pale from my indoor workdays.