Tallie smoked another cigarette and another with Rye as she listened to him. She had to force herself to think of him as Rye, and she’d gone from angry to sad to frustrated, braiding those emotions into one thick mess, only stopping when she fell into the habit she was so used to. What she got paid hundreds of dollars by the hour to do: To be a therapist. To listen. To ask the right questions. To listen and ask the right questions some more.
*
Tallie would’ve rallied and protested for Rye’s release if she’d lived in that town. She pictured herself staying up late, squeaking a black marker across white poster board. #FreeRyeKipling. Rye was arrested and tried because of racism. She could only imagine how hard it’d been for him, growing up in a little, mostly white town like Bloom, marrying and having a baby with the town princess like that.
*
“As far as honesty goes…I wouldn’t believe any of this if I hadn’t read it myself,” Tallie said to him, holding up her phone in the owl-light. The sky was lowering. She focused on the two pretty nurses—one zaftig, one skin and bones—sitting on a bench on the other side, smoking and speaking quietly in their cartoon-printed scrubs. A ring of white lights encircled them, like little moons. “I mean, obviously I understand why this would’ve sent you to the bridge,” she said, understanding fully now why he’d been so calm about Lionel catching fire. When he’d seen all he’d seen, what could possibly shock him?
“Thursday was my birthday,” he said, looking up. Four words revealing yet another cavernous truth.
“You were going to jump on your birthday.”
“Christine and Brenna…it was October. Even the sound of the fallen leaves reminds me of them. I can’t escape.”
“I can’t even imagine how unbearable it seems…how hard October is for you,” she said, falling into her rhythm of repetition again, signaling to her clients that she heard them. Rye’s eyes were red in the whites, rimmed with violent pink.
“I told myself if I could feel better, after being out of prison for a year…back in the world…I’d stick around. But this week came, my birthday came, and I didn’t feel better. Every day I had to look for a new reason to stay alive, and it became more and more difficult to find one.” He paused and took a tender breath in. He told her his parents had tried so hard to help, but he’d been completely closed off. They didn’t know what else to do, and neither did he. “I thought grief would kill me, and I wanted it to, but spending time with you…being there to help Lionel out…this weekend happened.”
“Well, I’m listening, and I hear you,” Tallie said.
“I had no clue what I needed, and you helped me—”
“But I still don’t understand what you talking to my ex-husband has to do with all this,” she said, aggressively fizzing out the s sounds so he couldn’t be mistaken about how she was feeling.
“It doesn’t. I have no excuse. It was a stupid thing, and it got out of hand—”
“What did you say to Joel?” she asked.
Rye talked, told her about the emails and Joel’s replies. He told her about telling Joel she was considering adopting a baby and that she had a boyfriend, too. She scratched at her neck, which had become unbearably itchy, and before she could open her mouth to say anything, he apologized again.
“I betrayed you, thinking I knew what you needed after only knowing you for a couple of hours, and I’m a total asshole for it.”
“Correct,” she said, scratching, wishing he could feel it, too. “And who was this supposed boyfriend?”
Rye looked at her.
“You?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Rye—”
“I’m so sorry.”
“So you told him everything. All the stuff I told you, when I thought we were getting to know each other, the things I didn’t want him to know. The things I could’ve told him myself but didn’t want to,” she said, nodding angrily.
“What he has with her…he always thought it’d be you. Wanted it to be you,” Rye said.
“He said that, even now, after everything?” Tallie sniffed and wiped her nose with an old tissue she found at the bottom of her purse. She smelled the dirty musk of tobacco on her fingers, and it nauseated her. What the hell had she been thinking? How had she lost control all weekend? She’d never smoke again. Never.
Before she could stop him, Rye began reading to her from his screen. Joel’s emails, spilling his heart. She listened to the words of a kinder, less defensive Joel. A contrite Joel.