Sing

CHAPTER 22.

JONATHAN

That went poorly.

I hadn’t intended to ask for her hand until she said the name of my father’s investment shell. He’d bought her house to save her when I couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Whichever. I simply didn’t and the reason I didn’t was I didn’t know she was in that kind of trouble. I could only know and see what she brought to me, and if she chose to protect me, I was impotent to protect her. I was stuck I inside four walls with things sticking out of me, tied to a bed as much as I’d tied her.

By the time the smoke cleared, she was gone, and I couldn’t explain. I didn’t want to talk on the phone. Couldn’t, actually. My body betrayed me with exhaustion, long breaths, and lost consciousness. I needed to be in her visual field, to see what I was too tired to intuit, to let her experience the long spaces between sentences that would seem like anger or petulant silence on the phone, but were me trying to breathe around my goddamn damaged heart.

I loved her. I wanted her. There was no one else. She felt right in ways no other woman ever had. Of course I was going to marry her, one day, when I was out of this shitbox, untied from this bed. After more dinners and late nights. After more boundary leaping and fighting. More touching, kissing, laughing.

Just not now.

Except that it had to be now. I felt myself failing. The dips into unconsciousness came with less warning. The effort to exist was such a task, I couldn’t imagine actually living. Was I scared? Fuck, yes I was terrified, and the only thing that kept it at bay was the thought that I could make her life better than it had been, that I could save her from her chronic penury, keep her from the manipulations of men like my father. If I could die knowing I’d saved her, maybe I would have served my purpose. It wasn’t like the money had anywhere useful to go, anyway.

Theresa sat in the chair Monica usually occupied, leaning forward, fingers knit together. I wanted to explain all of it to her, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it right, to explain my fear, my need to know Monica was all right, to keep a slice of control. I gave her the shortest version I had.

“I don’t blame her for saying no,” she said. “You need to get better first.”

“What if I don’t get better?”

“She’ll be a widow.”

At twenty-five. And when was her birthday? She’d told me she was a Cancer, but if she told me the exact date, I couldn’t call it up in my memory. I realized we’d never even celebrated a birthday together. Neither mine nor hers. I wanted to get her something extravagant six months early, to make up for the time we’d never have. And Christmas, of course.

“What’s today?” I asked Theresa.

“The twentieth.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“What do you want under the tree? Besides a ‘yes?’”

“I want her,” I whispered. “I asked for the wrong reasons. But I want her.”

She put her elbows on the bed and her hand on my shoulder. “Do it for the right reasons. Don’t do it because it’s convenient now. Don’t do it because you’re scared. Marry her because you love her, and your life wouldn’t add up without her. Can you do that? Can you promise me you’re not forcing it? It would break my heart to see you do this because you wanted to give yourself a reason to live.”

I rarely saw Theresa so impassioned. She was more like Jessica than any of my sisters in her refinement and grace. She seemed broken down that day, slightly shattered, holding herself together with chicken wire.

“What’s wrong, Tee?”

“I don’t think love should be taken for granted, and I don’t think you should keep on a path of least resistance.”

“This is hardly—“

“Can you say, honestly, that if you were healthy you’d marry her?”

“Yes. But we’d have a proper engagement.” I thought about all Jessica and I had together and I wanted to give it to Monica, but couldn’t. A party, a ring, a wedding. I wanted to see her smiling as she came down the aisle, toward me, that last time before we folded into each other’s lives forever.

Theresa pressed something into my palm. It was hard and scratchy and oddly shaped.

“Give it back when you can buy her her own.”

I lifted my hand, it was her engagement ring, a two carat sapphire cut that was totally Theresa, and utterly wrong for Monica.

“Daniel won’t be happy,” I said.

“He’ll tell himself he cares. But we cancel each other out. We add up to nothing. Trust me when I say, I’d rather break up for the right reasons than get married for the wrong ones.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I can’t explain why I feel okay about it, but I do.”

I held the ring in my fist as if I was afraid to lose it. “Thank you.”

“I’ll try and come back, but you might not see me for awhile.” She kissed my forehead and left, I fell asleep with the ring in my hand.