For two weeks, Autumn and Hank were happy. (When they weren’t fighting, at least.) Hank’s pep talk about Summer gave Autumn a little comfort, but not much. They carried out some autumnal activities like hayrides and bonfires and trips to pumpkin patches that were supposed to warm you inside and make you snuggle up against the person you were going to spend the winter with, but these moments felt strangely empty. And then one night, the dream hit. Not just any dream, but the one that had haunted Autumn on and off for years, laughing at her from the darkness whenever she started getting happy: her father’s exit from her family.
The worst thing about Autumn Mahal’s dad was that he was not a bad man. Looking back, Autumn had always wanted her father to be some black-and-white-villain, some instantly-hateable dickwad she could detest without feeling guilty about it. As the man who had ruined her ability to love, she wanted to hate him with everything within her, but she couldn’t. He wasn’t evil or cruel or even especially careless. He was worse than that: he was just a nice, gentle man who had fallen out of love with his family. And that made her terrified of every man, because if his heart could turn black, whose couldn’t?
Even as a tiny girl, Autumn could sense that her parents were not in love – their words were as sharp as their eyes were. And whenever Autumn had the dream of that day, she saw it again, that frustrating thing in his eyes – the kindness, the goodness. There was no knockdown fight the day he left in December, he just packed some things, kissed Autumn on the ear, left, and never came back. And ever since then, Autumn knew she would leave, too. If anyone ever got too close, she’d be gone. And as she woke up one cloudy morning, the flashback dream of her father’s departure hovering on the edge of her mind, she knew the time was coming.
And so they were thrown deeper into the fall. Autumn began second-guessing herself at every turn, giving into the darkness growing within her. When it was good between her and Hank, it was heaven, and when it was bad, it was hell. Autumn resented him for daring to love her. He looked at her with too much love in his eyes, held her too closely, spoke a little too nicely to her. He was killing her, and he didn’t even know it. It was all starting to get sickening, because really, who would love Autumn? She was worthless. She was trash. Summer was dead, and she would never feel happiness again – why should Autumn be allowed to, either? Why should she wait for Hank to leave, just like her father had? Why not get it out of the way? So she stopped caring again. For good this time. She stopped designing her cat clothes. She quit jogging and started heading straight for the potato chip aisle every time she went to the grocery store. She drank more and let it plunge her into depression. She even blew off a follow-up appointment, turning off her phone when the doctors started calling the next day. And soon she had been pulled under by the fear. So she fulfilled that prophecy by making herself alone. If she was worthless on the inside, then she would be worthless on the outside, too. She would make sure of it. It was like when you tried to spell a crazily long word and got tripped up on one or two letters, and before you knew it, the word no longer even made sense to you anymore and you’d gotten lost in it. Autumn was lost in her own life – she had taken a wrong turn within her own soul, and nothing she did or said or thought seemed to help.
“Hey, babe,” Hank said one evening as she watched TV in her room. He set down his workbag and wiped his forehead. She’d been sneaking mouthfuls of white zinfandel from the fridge all day, not that she would ever tell anyone. She noted that the word babe sounded acidic coming from his mouth. She was nobody’s babe. She was garbage.
“Hey,” he said again after she didn’t respond, “were you gonna think of cleaning up the kitchen? I don’t want your grandma to show up and flip out on you again like when you left the sink on and flooded the bathroom.”
“Fuck you!” she snapped, letting out a hot burst of injured rage, a long-dormant geyser slipping out some steam and roaring to life. She was together and alone on a California king bed, drowning in the sick disgust that creeps in when you are being looked at by someone who loves you more than you could ever love yourself. “I’m a woman. Don’t tell me what to do, you sexist.”
Hank looked down at the floor, stung. “Okay, but…what does your gender have to do with the Pringles cans all over the kitchen?”
“It’s my kitchen, anyway,” she said, letting out the words she wished she hadn’t. “Why does it even matter to you? None of your beeswax, buddy. Get your own damn kitchen, for all I care.”
“Why are you acting like this, Autumn?”
She crossed her arms like the child her father had left behind. “I don’t know. Does a bear hear a tree that falls silently in the woods while the trains pass at night?”
He stared at her. “I…that’s not real. That’s not an actual saying. You’re mixing sayings.”
“You are,” she said, refusing to look at him.
“Okay, whatever, I am.”
This was Autumn’s modus operandi: she would lapse into the intonations and language of a tween, when her cancer diagnosis and emotional trauma had frozen her in emotional age. So she took out her phone and tried to calm herself.
“What are you doing?”
“Wanting to shank this bitch, Stephanie, for sub-tweeting me.”
His head tilted.
“Sub-tweeting,” she repeated. “It’s when they say something about you, but they don’t mention your name, they just passive-aggressively insult you to pick at you.”
Hank still did not understand. He could sense that he was supposed to be mad at something, he just had no idea what it was.
Autumn held out her phone. “Okay, sorry for cussing. Here, look. She said ‘I hate Indian food, and everything else Indian, too.’ It’s clearly about me – I saw her giving me side-eye at work the other day when you sent me those flowers. She’s sick with jealousy of me, and I won’t stand for it.”
“Sounds like this girl isn’t a sub-poster, she’s just a racist,” Hank said, glancing at the phone. “Why does it even matter?”
“It’s subtweeting, not subposting. And I was just checking her profile to make sure I still hated her – spoiler alert, looks like I do. And it matters because it matters, and the fact that you don’t understand why it matters is the whole problem! You’re my boyfriend – you’re supposed to back me up on these things.”
“Not if these ‘things,’ are stupid,” he said, and Autumn seethed again.
“Fine,” she said, and even thought she knew she was acting like a garbage person, she couldn’t stop. “And next time you want to-”
Autumn went silent. Instead of turning and launching into a forty-minute fight, as usual, Hank did something strange next – he just walked out and left.
Autumn huffed and took out her iPad to read a book. It was mildly terrifying that Hank had thrown in the towel so early, but she tried not to dwell on it. Besides, her bratty, shitty behavior wasn’t just about this. It would never be just about this. Hank was scared of his past and Autumn was terrified of her future and the one person they both loved was dead. How stupid Autumn had been, to assume they could outrun their monsters together. You could never escape the fear. It was just there, a dormant volcano, two tectonic plates about to explode with pent-up pressure. The earthquake was coming. And it did, the very next day.
It was another rough start. The Summer nightmares started as soon as she’d fallen asleep the night before, and they didn’t end until before dawn. Autumn was angry and hormonal and MAC had just discontinued her favorite shade of eye shadow and so she picked a fight. A bigger fight. Hank loved her too much, her attempts to push him away had failed, and now she was going to double down and shove him. Hard. It was like she felt imposter syndrome within her own happiness: this person wasn’t her, and this life wasn’t the one she deserved. So she ruined it. And these are the ultimate tragedies of the human race: that we run from what we love, that we embrace what is bad for us, and that we battle against what scares us.
“Do you like my bangs?” she asked as he fell down on the mattress next to her. It was raining outside, the sort of soft winter rain that clears the streets and drives you into bed. “If you say no, I’ll drown myself.”
Hank didn’t laugh. It was only now occurring to her how dark he’d been lately, how different he’d been from the witty, sarcastic boy from the summer, the boy who’d tried to keep her around. “Yeah, they’re great. Hey, did you pay the electricity bill? You wanted me to remind you.”
“No. Why would I do that?”
“…Because you’re an adult?”
“Well maybe I don’t want to be one anymore,” she said. “Adulting is too hard. I think I saved the receipt, so take it back to the store and get a refund and make me a baby again.”
He looked over at her. “God, could you chill for a minute?”
“I am fucking chill! I’m going to Winn-Dixie.”
“You can’t go there,” he said, “you got banned for having a meltdown at the bakery after they ran out of those raspberry donuts, remember?”
“I was having a bad day, okay?”
He rolled his eyes. In the past, this was the point where he’d throw in the towel and change the subject. But not anymore. “What,” he said as he stared down at his shoes, “did you get sick of keeping guard over Satan’s gates of hell with the other angels of death?”
“No, my favorite girl on The Bachelor got chlamydia and had to go home, for your information,” she said. “And what is wrong with you? You know we’re not supposed to be talking about all the places I’ve been banned from.”
He frowned over at her, and she wanted to melt into his eyes. God, she loved him so much. He made everyone else look like garbage. She was pushing harder, and he wasn’t budging. So she took out the big guns. Because no matter how much damaged people loved someone, the instinct to push them away would always overpower the desire to let them in.
She stared at him, her hot angry brain thinking about things you can’t unsay, and contemplating why we even said them in the first place.
“I’ve been thinking,” she began, the fire finding a home in her. “What if this isn’t forever? What if we’re just fooling ourselves?”
“Huh?”
He looked a little hurt, and she tried not to smile about it. She was digging down deep and she liked it. “Maybe we’re just not compatible. You know, we’re so different, and you barely understand my cancer journey, and, like, you wear cargo shorts.”
He dismissed her. He didn’t even fight with her, he just dismissed her. “Don’t say that, baby,” he said, turning back to his phone. She got closer to him then, daring him to quit her with only a look.
“I’m nobody’s baby.”
He kicked his leg in a sort of awkward way. “Goddamnit, Autumn. Can you please quit it?”
“No. I can’t. I’m on edge. I just ate a piece of asparagus and now I’m waiting to see how much weight I’ve lost.”
“What?”
“I’m on a diet, and you can’t argue with the specialists.”
He snatched away the piece of paper by her side. “Autumn, this isn’t even a real diet, this is something you printed from Tumblr. It looks like it was written by a middle schooler.”
“Whatever! It says I’m supposed to eat only asparagus and I’ll lose fifteen pounds!”
“Calm down, Autumn.”
“No. I hate you! I hate you now and I hated you yesterday!”
And then something snapped, just like that.
Hank looked down at the floor, and he was almost crying. “I hate you too, then,” he said, his voice shaking, as the energy in the room somehow shifted, darkened, collapsed.
“What?”
“You heard me. I can’t do this anymore.”
And the bottom just fell out of her.
“…You can’t do what anymore?”
He stared down at the floor she hadn’t swept in weeks. “You. This. All you ever do is push me away, and I can’t take it anymore. You got your wish. I’m gone.”
He rose from the bed.
“Wait…what?”
She got up and followed him, open-mouthed, as he started picking up his keys and wallet and phone. But he didn’t stop – he didn’t turn back and tell her it was a joke. For some reason, everyone is surprised when the traps they set for themselves finally work.
“No!” she said as they hit the family room. “You’re not supposed to leave!”
He said nothing. His eyes were as dead as the summer was.
“Come on!” she cried. “We were just supposed to fight all night and then have hot makeup sex! I wasn’t serious when I said I hated you – you should know that by now!”
He stopped by the door and glared at her. She pulled back at him harder. “Come on, don’t leave! I’m PMS-ing and it’s raining outside and I’m just being a psycho and this isn’t supposed to be happening! I run out in the yard, you chase me, I cry and tell you to eat shit, you lead me back inside, remember?”
He swallowed hard, a sadness in his eyes. When someone’s disposition slides from angry to apologetic: that’s when you should really start to worry.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said again, slowly, as Autumn swayed a little. All her worst fears, all her self-designed horrors, were rushing out at her, and suddenly she realized: holy fuck. This is it. I have done it. Panic rushed into her and she planted her feet on her dirty tile, blinked, and took a breath as the walls fell in. She knew she had to do something, and she shivered and stood taller.
“Hank, I’m scared.”
The room filled with her shrill, shaking, last-ditch voice. He stopped, turned to her one last time. “I’m scared. I’m really fucking scared all the time, okay? My parents’ marriage was a natural disaster and I might have cancer and my whole life has felt like a battle up a mountain in a blizzard and my best friend is fucking dead and nothing ever works out for me and, oh God, sometimes I push things down before they have the chance to fall apart, because it’s all going to come crashing down in the end, anyway, right? But please don’t do this, Hank. Please stay. Please don’t let me defeat us.”
He said nothing.
“This is the first time I’ve ever looked straight ahead when I walked. Please don’t make me start looking down again.”
He set down his keys and picked them up again, and they jingled more loudly than usual. His arm was shaking. He looked back at her and took a breath. “I’m so tired, Autumn. I’m so fucking tired.” And then he left, disappearing into the humid blackness of her garage, and both of them somehow knew he would not be coming back.
The door closed behind him. He was gone, and it was real. And for the first time Autumn understood why they called it “heartbreak:” for all the world, it felt as if the hand of God himself had reached into her chest and torn her heart clear in half. She’d done it. She’d finally forced him away.
And in that moment, Autumn took a memory of him and placed it on the highest shelf of her heart, just to prepare herself for the loneliness that would await her in the coming months. But it was not a memory of the perturbed, distracted Hank of late, the Hank at the end, when she was doing all she could to push him away and ruin their love. It was the Hank from the beginning, the smiling boy from the bench that day at Summer’s. It was the Hank that would laugh at her at the dog park and get caught staring at her in the jewelry aisle at the department store and cling to her for dear life in the hours before dawn as his past screamed out at him. It was the Hank she had ruined, the Hank she would never get back. So as Hank fled down the street from the mess she had made, Autumn slid down onto her cold tile floor and hid their memories away in a pocket of her soul, armed with the knowledge that in some other world, those versions of them would live on, and she would be his girl, just like that, forever.