A Happy Catastrophe
“After a heart attack, even a mild one, many people experience depression and an awareness of their own mortality,” it says on one website. “Contact your doctor if this becomes extreme.”
Thank you, World Wide Web, for that piece of advice. I wonder if that description was written by Patrick, back when his job was to caution the world about the perils of being alive.
Speaking of Patrick and depression and the perils of being alive—he is being very circumspect about how things are going with Fritzie.
When I call his phone, Fritzie is the one who answers, and she is buzzing with news, all of it—complaints, announcements, gossip, exclamations—tumbling out accompanied by sighs and laughs and snorts and the kind of heavy breathing you only get when you’re talking and jumping off of a bed at the same time. She’s going to be in a spelling bee, she has to write a report about recycling, she went to a movie with Blanche Turner and it was sooo boring, she lost her hat but Patrick bought her another one, they had chicken for dinner again, Ariana has been too busy to come upstairs very much but it’s very loud down there and Patrick thinks more people than just her are living there, but he doesn’t want to go down and see, he says, because he’s not the police. “That’s what he said, Marnie. He is not the police.”
“Well, that’s true . . .” I say.
“So I went down there on Saturday. I wanted to know what was going on, and so I knocked on the door, and they let me in, and there were three girls there. Ariana, Charmaine, and that girl, Janelle, the one who’s going to have a baby. And they had just gotten out of bed and they were still in their pajamas with their hair all messy, and they were drinking coffee and they were all doing some fortune-telling cards, they said, and they asked me if I wanted my fortune told, but I said no and went upstairs.”
“Why didn’t you want your fortune told?”
“I dunno.”
“Maybe you didn’t believe in it?”
“I . . . guess. There’s some stuff I don’t want to know,” she says.
“What?”
“I don’t want to know if . . .” I can hear her breathing into the phone, taking deep breaths. She taps on something nearby, tap tap tap. “I don’t want to know . . . if I’m going to have to go back to live with my mum.”
“Oh, honey,” I say, and I close my eyes. How can I possibly protect her from heartbreak? I can’t, is the truth of it. She’s not mine, and Patrick is not mine, and despite the fact that I fall asleep every night thinking of him and wishing things were different, nothing has changed.
One day he sends a photo of him and Fritzie smiling into the camera, and I see that she has hardly any hair. Just a fuzz of brown on her head.
What happened to her hair? I text him.
He types: #DIYHaircut. #Holymoly #GodHelpUs #HairArt #DontBeMadAtMe #IDidntKnow.
I type back: What the actual freaking hell is going on there?
He sends an emoji of a man shrugging. She says she “arted” her hair. Resembles POW. #GoodTimes #NeverADullMoment.
And then . . . well, that’s it.
No declarations of love, of missing me, of the hole in their lives without me. Because he is not my destiny. Because absence is not making his heart grow fonder. Someday his name won’t make me smile, and the memories won’t make me cry anymore, and I will heal up.
Because it’s over.
One night, unable to sleep, I can’t help myself, and I call Patrick up when I know Fritzie won’t be the one to intercept the phone.
“I just want to ask you a question,” I say when he answers.
“Um, okay.”
“Why, if you knew that you couldn’t father a child, were we using condoms all that time, for years?”
He sighs. “The reason we were using condoms is because I didn’t know. After the fire, whether or not I could have a kid was the last thing on my mind, if you want to know the truth. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to live.”
“But you said the doctor told you.”
“He says he did. But I don’t remember it. It wasn’t until I went to him recently and was telling him that you and I were trying—”
“Wait a minute. Were you trying? Because it didn’t feel to me that you were. It felt like to me you were going along under duress, and you never even wanted to have sex anyway, so it was a moot point.”
He’s silent for a moment. “Wow. I wasn’t expecting this.”
“Patrick,” I say after letting the silence between us grow heavier and heavier, almost unbearably heavy. “I have wanted a baby for a long time. I told you that I wanted a baby, and you built up a whole wall of nonsensical jokey excuses about school meetings and report card conferences. You did not once look me in the eye and say the truth, which was, ‘You know something? I’m most likely infertile.’”
“Because I didn’t remember being told that. What part of that are you not getting? And this is exactly why we can’t be together anymore. Because you are always going to see this as my failure. You are always going to wish for that other life.”
“Why can’t I be the one to decide how important that is? There are other solutions, you know.”
“Are there, though?”
“Well, at least we could have talked about it. You could have been honest about what was going on. You just let everything fall apart. Stopped loving me. Like, suddenly. Just stopped.”
“Marnie, it’s been a really rough few months. But you know that I loved you. I’ll always love you.”
“It’s just not the kind of love that does anybody any good—is that it?” I say. “You said you didn’t want to be a parent. Your whole argument was that you’d have to go in public, you’d have to talk to teachers and other parents, people would be thinking about your scars, on and on and on—and now look at you, Patrick, handling all that just fine.”
He’s silent.
“And it’s doable, isn’t it? And here’s what I’m left with: the great love of your life turns out to be Anneliese, and even though she’s dead, she’s the woman who’s been soaking up all your attention and love all these months—”
“I—”
“And the child you couldn’t even consider having with me—it turns out you already had her! What do you know? She’s here. Another woman shows up with her! And so now you’re being a dad—a temporary, one-year dad! Hooray for you! You get to have this whole experience and then, ohhh, you’ll get to miss her when she’s gone just like you missed Anneliese when she was gone. But as for me: I’m the real-life woman standing right in front of you, yet I’m invisible to you.”
“I cannot get you pregnant,” he tells me in a steely voice I’ve never heard from him before. “You can get mad about that all you want to, but it doesn’t change anything.”
“Well, you certainly acted like you could and just didn’t want to,” I say. “It sounds to me like it’s terribly convenient that now there’s a medical reason that shows up. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Well, me too. It’s actually kind of soul-crushingly sad. And by the way, I do not happen to believe you love me. Nobody acts like this to a person they love.”