Day 75
At the sound of the doorbell, Jon jolted from his chair. Was he dreaming? Had he fallen asleep? Or had he simply zoned out somehow? That last was getting more and more common; he would awaken at work with no recollection of what he had been doing. Just today he had found himself in his car, the motor idling, in front of his parents' house, fumbling for a garage-door opener that was no longer there, while his confused parents knocked on his windshield in the twilight. He hoped he wasn't going insane. He had enough problems as it was.
"Good evening," said Meredith Chambers. "I hope we're— Goodness, Jon, you look terrible. Have you been sleeping?"
"Uhh," said Jon, trying to make his voice less gravelly and not particularly succeeding. "Come on in."
She and Brandon did, with Christa and Zach bringing up the rear. There was no sign of Laurelyn; perhaps she'd been left with the friend Sarah Prescott, or maybe even with her grandparents. "So!" said Zach. "Two weeks until the big day, huh?"
"Uhh," said Jon. His brain felt like tar. "What?"
"Your wedding reception," Meredith said patiently. "It's two weeks from tomorrow. Caitlyn asked us to come up because we offered to help with the planning and organization. Where is she, anyway?"
Jon looked at her guileless face; at the equally bland expression on Brandon's. Then he looked at the Cranes. "Who told you."
"Who told us what?" Christa said.
"Hey, man, we're not blind," Zach said. "We've been in practice with you. You're like a walking zombie. But you didn't seem to want to talk about it. So we didn't ask."
"Instead you just showed up?" said Jon.
"Well, we
were
invited," said Zach.
"By Caitlyn," Meredith said. "Where is she, anyway? Caitlyn!" She descended into the rest of the apartment. "Caitl— Is she not here?"
"I see her backpack," Christa said. "We saw both of your cars when we came in. Jon, what's going on?"
"Have you been sleeping on the
couch
?" Zach exclaimed. "What
is
going on?"
Jon decided to tell them. It was four simple words:
Caitlyn has left me.
They weren't all that hard to say; in fact, he had said them—each of them individually, of course—many times in his life. He was capable of saying these words. He had never strung them together in quite that order before, of course, but he was sure he was up to the challenge. It was just four words.
He opened his mouth. What came out of it was, "...
Oh God.
"
Then there was no more speech for a while, because he was crying, as the enormity of it all settled over him.
Caitlyn has left me.
His wife, his light; all his hopes and dreams of the future had walked out the door and never returned. He wasn't even sure she missed him.
When he could look up again, Christa and Brandon were sitting on the couch to either side of him. Meredith had pulled over a chair from the kitchen table, and Zach was on the futon.
"Okay," said Christa. "Let's start from the beginning. What happened?"
"I... We... We had a difference of opinion."
"And that's why she's not
here
anymore?"
"...It was a big difference."
Christa gave a cracked smile. "I hadn't noticed."
Slowly, with many fits and starts, they walked him through it. He found himself repeating himself, mis-remembering, having to go back and change his mind. The truth was that he'd been in denial this whole time—he'd even taken to sleeping on the couch, because it was easier than going back to that empty bed. Sometimes, passing through to go to the bathroom, he thought he could still smell her—sometimes the smell of her sex, sometimes her shampoo, sometimes even the faint reddish scent of her skin.
It was easier to avoid the bed.
People knew something was wrong, of course; there was no way to avoid that, what with his zoning out every few minutes in the middle of God-knew-what. His coworkers had asked him about it, and while he'd only said that there were some issues at home, they knew enough to read between the lines. After all, this was the guy who'd had the opera singer sent by his wife; he was regionally famous now, enough for them to have some context. Many of them had stopped to offer their sympathy and support—his fellow trainees, some of the actual medical technicians, even a couple doctors.
One of the other technicians had the unfortunate name of Gretchen Webster, but she brought a lot of spunk to the role; she was slender, with wavy blonde hair and a frequent smile. She had been very solicitous of Jon ever since he'd come in on Wednesday like a zombie, and didn't seem to mind going out of her way to be helpful to him. When Caitlyn had told him about her little adventures with flirting at school, and asked him if there was anyone who caught his eye at work, it had been Gretchen who came to mind: upbeat, charming, never outside the bounds of propriety but always with that twinkle of mischief in her eye. She was Jon's kind of woman, and while she had been completely proper up until now, Jon could read between the lines. She was going to make some man very happy someday, and Jon found himself realizing that, under different circumstances, he might have been that man.
Maybe this is who I would've married if it weren't for Caitlyn. Maybe this is what my future was going to look like.
But she was so... Unworldly. He would look at her perfect face and her perfect white teeth and wonder if she had ever worked a day in her life. There was a certain maturity necessary to make relationships work—both a willingness to bend and a willingness to stand up for oneself. He wasn't sure she had either of them; how could she, when it seemed like she'd never so much as stubbed her toe over the course of her life? She had perfect clothes, perfect parents, a perfect job, a perfect car... She wasn't real; there was nothing behind that facade that didn't seem like it would crack at the first blow of the hammer. She didn't have the steel that came from long years of gritting through pain. She wasn't...
She wasn't Caitlyn.
"So, to summarize," Christa was saying. "You said that Caitlyn needs to be more defensive, and less prone to just letting people take advantage of her. And
Caitlyn
said that
you
need to be a better Christian—specifically, more open to the presence of God in your life, and to how He manifests through other people."
"That sounds about right," Jon said.
"And you... Didn't want to?"
"...Well, when you put it
that
way it sounds
really
lame."
"Well, maybe it
is
really lame," Christa said, giving him a look. "Jon, are you
really
saying that it's a good idea to be closed to new experiences?"
"Well... Not all experiences are good," Jon protested.
"Nonsense," Brandon said. "Experiences are what you make of them. Every cloud has a silver lining."
"Yeah, but every silver lining has a cloud," Jon said.
"And there you have it," Brandon said. "Jonathan Stanford, you are officially fucked. No matter
what
you do, there is a cloud associated with it. And since your objective is to avoid the clouds, that means you better not leave this apartment ever again. —Oh, wait: if you stay here, you'll run out of food. But then, if you eat food, you might get cancer, so you might as well not eat. And maybe you shouldn't sleep either, since you could roll out of bed and break your neck."
"What my husband is trying to say," Meredith said, "is that you
can't
avoid the clouds. Jonathan,
