“I used my key. I hope you don’t mind.” And then: “I love you so much, Asha.”
“I love you too.”
“I killed Stephen.”
“You didn’t.”
“He wanted to stop, I know he did. He just didn’t give me enough time. We were talking about his wife, how they had gone all the way to this little town in Kerala to get married. That’s the first time he had asked the platform for a ritual, and it had sent him halfway across the world. And he talked about how his wife had said that she felt her soul belonged in India even though she had never left Connecticut. He told me all of that. He talked and talked. But then, when I begged him to come down, when I said, ‘Put the lighter down and you can tell me the rest,’ this other look came over him, as if he was being taken over by something else, and he just turned around and then he was on fire.”
Cyrus is crying now. “I ran toward him, but he had poured the gasoline everywhere and I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t even get close.” I feel him shake and I tighten my arms around him.
“It’s okay,” I say. I rub his back. I keep talking, soothing, reassuring.
“We were supposed to do good,” he says. “We were supposed to be good.”
“I know.” What I think is, We could have been good. I feel a hollowness spreading through me, and then I can’t bear to be so near him. I get up, move to the armchair across the bed.
“The worst thing is, I ruined us,” Cyrus says to the ceiling.
“It took both of us to do that. You can’t take credit for everything.”
He manages a laugh. “Will you forgive me, Asha?”
“Of course I will. I do.”
He crosses the room, kneels in front of me. “I’m so sorry. I will make it up to you. When I come back, we’ll start over, I promise.”
“Come back? Where are you going?”
“I can’t stay here,” he says. “I need to think. I need to try to figure some things out. How I got to this place. Something happened to me and I need to fix it. There’s an ashram in Mysore.”
I have a sudden image of him flying to India and eating cratefuls of mangoes. “Cyrus, there’s a weird virus out there and we almost blew up our company. You’re really going to leave me here to clean up your mess while you fuck off to the beach?”
“Don’t be angry, Asha.”
The blood rushes to my cheeks. I am angry. I am so, so angry. “Dammit, Cyrus.”
“Let’s not fight, okay? I screwed up. Even though you gave me every chance to not screw up, I still went ahead and did it.”
“I can’t tell if you’re really apologizing or just feeling sorry for yourself.”
“You have to decide that.”
I look Cyrus straight in the eyes and it all comes rushing out of me. “Okay, then, let me tell you: you fucked up. You fucked up in the most profound sense. Not only that, you got everyone around us to believe that I was being paranoid when I was the only one who had my head screwed on straight. Marco is deeply damanged, anyone could see that, but you blew smoke in people’s eyes and they didn’t have the balls to call you on it. Not even Jules.”
“Don’t blame Jules.”
Now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. “Oh, I don’t. I blame you. The only thing that’s not your fault is the way people follow you, the way they believe in you even when you make mistakes. That is not your fault, that’s just the way you were made. But the rest of it—the rest of it belongs to you. And I need to take responsibility for the fact that I just went ahead and let you. I let you take charge, make all the decisions, as if you were the only one whose opinion mattered.”
And there it was. Sure, Cyrus displayed some epically bad judgment. But I gave him that power over me. I gave him all the privilege in the world so he could turn around and mess me up. It wasn’t your fault, Cyrus, it was mine. I bigged you up and smalled me down. I shone the light on you. I carried the water and let you drink. Every injustice was authored by me, every wound nudged by my hand, even if he bore the knife. I opened my shirt and he cut me.
He pauses for a long time, allowing my words to circle around us. “We’re not going to make it, are we?”
Cyrus does not need me to answer. He has always been able to look inside me, and now he can see it on my face, that though I may still love him and that the feeling of him, so close to me now, is enough to make my insides melt, too much has happened for us to be together.