“Later I’ll tell you,” I say. “Right now I need to think.”

And she and I go up to the roof, and we look out over the city and soak up the early summer morning light while we eat. It is so beautiful here, and life is so full of possibilities, even though I’m not going to be here for much longer.

How can I bear to leave knowing there is so much undone? I have to trust the universe to make it all work out for them.

I watch the doorway, but Patrick does not come upstairs to the rooftop. He’s downstairs pounding away on his computer keyboard, trapped by his own demons. And Marnie—Marnie’s heart is being broken somewhere far away. I can feel it.

You are going to be okay, I beam to her. And then to them both: Be brave. Be brave.

There is so much fear to wade through before you get to love.

SIX

MARNIE

Natalie texts me two days into my honeymoon: Is honeymoon Noah behaving better than wedding Noah?

MUCH BETTER, I write back. #ALLGOOD. WHEW! THANK GOODNESS.

And then I look across the table at my handsome, tousled husband, who is sipping his Bloody Mary and gazing out through his Ray-Ban sunglasses at the turquoise sea just beyond the jungle. He looks like an ad for the tropics. We are having a perfectly normal late breakfast on the hotel restaurant’s deck after having perfectly normal honeymoon sex last night, and I’m glad to report that Noah looks tanned and well rested and not anxious at all. There is just one tiny little thing: underneath the table, his knee is bouncing up and down like it’s connected to an unseen metronome.

He feels me concentrating on him and looks at me. We both smile, and I turn back to my eggs quickly before I have to see his smile fading.

Jesus.

He is going to break up with me. He’s just waiting for the right moment.

Which is probably why I’ve had a headache practically the entire time we’ve been here. I feel that my smile must look like a rictus grin, something you’d see on a skeleton. No wonder the waiter put our food on the table and backed away fast.

“Noah,” I say, and then can’t quite recall what I meant to say after that.

“What?” he says.

Do you love me? And do you remember when you first started spending the night at my apartment how sometimes my old bed frame would crash onto the floor when we made love? We started having to drag the mattress to the living room before sex. You joked that moving the mattress was the most exciting foreplay you’d ever had, and I knew I wanted to keep you forever.

“Nothing, never mind.”

“Do you want to go on a hike this afternoon?” he says grimly.

So we do. We walk through the little town and out into the jungle. He walks along quietly, like a man walking to his doom, stopping every once in a while to look at birds through his pair of binoculars, or to solemnly hand me the bottled water he put in the backpack. When his long, lovely fingers brush mine, I have to squeeze my eyes tight so that I don’t cry.

I am stumbling along the path behind him, tears blinding me, when I hear a voice in my head saying, You’re going to be okay. Be brave.

That’s when I take a deep breath and I say to his back, “Noah. Tell me what’s the matter.”

And he turns and looks at me, and I see that my week-old marriage is about to die right there on a path in the Costa Rican jungle.

It isn’t that he’s gone crazy or is suffering from anxiety, or any of the things I have tried to tell myself. It’s worse than that. It really does turn out to be lawn mowers.

“Lawn mowers,” I say blankly.

Ahead of us on the path is a middle-aged couple in matching Bermuda shorts and powder-blue T-shirts. When she passed us, the woman told me that if you wear light blue, butterflies might land on you. She said this giggling, and the man had laughed, too, and then they’d set out on the path, arm in arm. I watch their retreating backs. She is oblivious to the fact that there is a butterfly riding on her back.

“Excuse me, sir,” I say in a low voice, only for Noah’s benefit, once they are out of earshot. “Sir, I know this may sound strange, but could I ask you your deepest feelings about the lawn mower in your garage? Are you in any way afraid of it, sir?”

“Shut up, Marnie,” Noah says.

“No, please, Noah. Tell me these fears you have, the ones you’ve just discovered in yourself on the day you got married to me.”

He scowls. “It’s the tyranny of lawn mowers, not the things themselves,” he says. “And it’s not just the lawn mowers. I don’t want any of it: the lawn, the household budgets, the electric bill, the daily conversation that goes: ‘How was your day, no, how was your day? Did you have a good day?’ I can’t do it.”

“The tyranny of lawn mowers and being asked, ‘How was your day,’” I say slowly. “You can’t do ‘How was your day.’” The sky is full of birds. Parrots are screaming around us.

You are going to be okay, Marnie.

He shrugs and looks off into the distance, ruggedly handsome and bored with me.

A memory swims up in my head of the time last year when he went with me to Florida to meet my parents. My mother, a firm believer in the Getting to a Man’s Heart through His Stomach theory of romance, insisted on cooking us dinner. We all sat there in my mom’s little suburban kitchen with the rooster wallpaper and the rooster salt-and-pepper shakers, and she made us her signature dish, which my father nicknamed Millie’s Magnificent Masterpiece Meatloaf, so named because she melts whole chunks of two different kinds of cheese into the meat, and then she serves it, glistening with ketchup poured over the top. Ketchup! Only the finest for the MacGraws.

For as long as I can remember, Thursday has always been meatloaf night, and every single week my father would rub his hands together in great anticipation and exclaim as though it were Thanksgiving and Christmas and the Fourth of July all at once. And here they were, sharing this with my new boyfriend. And they were so happy about it! It broke my heart, all this optimism they had for us, when I could see, with paralyzing shame, that this handsome, bright-eyed boyfriend of mine, sitting there in their modest little three-bedroom ranch, was watching them with a little dazed half smile on his face. I knew that look: he was fashioning this whole incident into a comedy routine he’d entertain people with later. Like, really, dude, ketchup on the top? he’d say. Please tell me you’re not really going to use two kinds of cheese inside! It’s too, too extravagant for words!

He doesn’t get domestic life, the way you can be glad for such stupid, simple things. That you can bicker and fight your way through marriage, and then Thursday night meatloaf comes to save you.

I should have known then. I should have broken up with him right then.

I wish to hell I had.

“Okay, look, I’ve done something kind of awful,” he says finally. He puts his hand up to shade his eyes. “I didn’t tell you, but on a lark I applied for a fellowship to go to Africa with Whipple. I never thought I’d get it, and to tell you the truth, I forgot all about it. But then, lo and behold, it came through. I found out a week before the wedding.” He picks up a stick and pokes at the ground, drawing circles in the soft dirt. My ears are ringing from all the jungle noises around us.

“‘Lo and behold,’” I say, mocking him. “Lo and behold, you happened to apply for a fellowship. On a lark.”

He stabs the dirt with the end of the stick.

“What the fuck, Noah?”

“I know. I shouldn’t have done it.”

“No! If this is something you really wanted, then of course you should have done it. That’s when you’re supposed to talk about it. That’s when you say to your fiancée, the person you’re going to share your life with, ‘Hey, there’s something I might like to do. What do you think?’ You’re supposed to communicate with me.”

“We shouldn’t have gotten married.”

“Why does it mean we can’t be married? You think celibacy is a requirement for going to Africa?”

It hits me then, the true meaning of what he’s saying: that the fact that he would on impulse apply for a fellowship without even telling me means that I am completely peripheral to his life. That’s what this is. He was always so proud of the way we never fight. But maybe if you never fight, it only means you don’t care enough.

I try again. “What if—what if I come and join you? What if we both do this together? You’ll see,” I say. “I can be adventurous, too.” Oh God, I’m being so pathetic. A monkey swings down from a vine and I think he’s going to smack me, but he only wants my granola bar, so I let him take it.

Noah clears his throat and tells me he doesn’t want any of the life we’d planned: not the house in the suburbs, the three children, our teaching careers. None of it.

“I thought I could do it,” he says. “Really I did. I love you, but—”

“Just shut up, please. If there is any worse sentence than the one that starts, ‘I love you, but—’ then I don’t know what it is.”