WILD HORSES

Five and a half months after Adam died, Frances and I started dating. No one gave us too much grief for it and we were very private about the whole affair. In retrospect, of course, I find it grossly inappropriate and wholly reflective of exactly the type of man I was through my mid-twenties. She and I only dated for seven months. I tell this the way I tell most things about that period: with the confidence of someone who has had a long time to decide what it means, and the persistent, uncomfortable suspicion that I am still getting it wrong.

         When I saw the area code – 406, Montana– pop up on my phone the night that he died, I didn’t immediately worry even if I knew it was obviously something to do with Adam. He was the only person I knew from there. Naïvely, over the course of our entire friendship, I believed Adam to be completely indestructible or inseparable from my life– if I was alive and well, so was he. I had assumed he was calling me from some payphone he’d found while stopped for gas; that he was going to try and make me laugh by pretending to be a tax collector or a phonebanker for a Republican senator calling at 1:46 in the morning. It wasn’t him, of course. Besides, Adam had left Missoula at 5 that evening and wouldn’t have been in Montana anymore by that time of night. Instead, it was his mother Penelope calling to inform me Adam had been in a car accident and died. The evening of May 7th, in Ritzville, was clear and temperate; the road he was driving on as flat and straight as any road in Adams County, Washington ever has been. Adam was a good driver: very courteous of animals, attentive, cautious, used to driving long distances. And yet. 

Nevertheless, I asked Penelope on the phone that night if I was the first person outside of the family she had notified. Technically, I was the first to hear the news, but I had not been the first she called. She had attempted to call Frances, his girlfriend of five months, and she had not answered the phone. The call lasted less than two minutes. Neither of us had much to say.

Still I am unsure what led me to the following conclusion, but I believed it with intense conviction not even a moment after we had hung up: Penelope, and Adam’s stepfather Jack– would be careless with his belongings. Whoever went through his apartment first (as I was not confident it would be me even if I thought it ought to be), they’d throw away half of what I cared to keep and hoard the other half just for it to rot in Jack and Penelope’s cellar alongside relics from Adam’s childhood. 

With that in mind, I walked the two blocks to his apartment before I had enough sense to be devastated; before I could feel anything at all. To me, then, Adam wasn’t dead yet. Adam was just out of town, I thought, visiting his family for the weekend like he had been. The whole time, I was nearly chuckling to myself. This is a hilarious thing I am doing– stuffing things of his that anyone else would find useless into my pockets. He will really get a kick out of this, won’t he? I took a jacket of his, a black blouson hung up on his bedroom doorknob, and stuffed all of the things that I baselessly assumed would get thrown away into the pockets: a stout snifter glass, a baseball cap, a pack and a half of American Spirit Blues, a yellow t-shirt, one Zippo lighter, three different pens, a tube of Chapstick. God, he will find this so funny, I bet. When he gets back, I’ll come in to greet him wearing the yellow shirt and the blouson and I’ll light an American Spirit with the ugly green Zippo lighter and he’ll notice and we will laugh and laugh. 

         I lingered around for only a moment in his apartment, doing all the things I’d learned to do in grief from the films: brushed my fingers over photographs, told myself he’s gone! as I stared at the living room he would never return to, held up scarves to my nose and inhaled deeply to smell nothing but cigarettes and sweat and maybe the slightest tinge of shampoo. The whole visit to his apartment is a blur, especially because I only stayed for a few minutes, but I distinctly remember feeling a crushing sort of disappointment not that he was dead but that I wasn’t feeling it yet and that none of the things I did could bring me to tears. I wanted to dramatically sob and heave and collapse to my knees onto his floor and the feeling simply did not come like I believed it should have. 

Only when I went to leave, feeling nothing like a thief yet, did I remember his stack of notebooks in his bedroom. Since high school, Adam had written in his notebook nearly every day– songs, lists, jokes, aphorisms. He got the same kind every time (a bright red Moleskine), only discernible from each other because of the dates he’d write on the sides. I had seen things written in the older ones a handful of times, but never did I see inside any of the ones he kept from ages 20 onwards, which were three of the eight notebooks. He wouldn’t want anyone touching those in particular, and that was reason enough to get me to pick up those three of them before I left.

At home, I arranged them on my desk, the way it’d look if he was over at my place and had so comfortably left his items on my surfaces– keys, phone, notebooks, cigarettes, pens, trash from his pockets– half hazard and familiar. I did not open them and go through them even though I had always been curious. As it stood, I was too baffled to, and after I returned to my apartment I began to drink in excess until I was terribly ill; the most I had ever been from alcohol. 

Adam and I had stayed in Seattle after undergraduate, the both of us still nursing dreams of moving some place better than Seattle or either of our hometowns. He made good music and lazed around on good money from his parents. I made bad money at a bad job at the Seattle Times. The two of us were happy. Drunk after an open mic, once, he told me– sweat plastering his hair to his forehead and Butterscotch Blonde Telecaster slung around his body– that he needed to burn all his work before he died like Proust. Between the two of us, I had assumed I would die first, so I didn’t offer to be the one to shoulder this responsibility if he never got the chance to. Lucky for me– or for him– the current notebook that he had on him when he crashed was never found and I could only ever wonder what happened to it. Thrown from the car, out of the shattered windshield? Crushed, or burned, or jammed between twisted metal? 

Those notebooks, to Penelope and Adam’s stepfather, Jack, were the missing pieces in their grief that could lead to some closure. Meant to be laid in the center of all the agony was some sort of elucidatory sentence or two from his writing that they could only find through tearing through all his things, over and over again, until they eventually were supposed to stumble upon it. It wasn’t as if a suicide note or a prediction of his death would be laden within the pages, but they had been grappling aimlessly for any sort of explication in their grief particularly after they came to find out that, while the cause of the crash itself could only be left to speculation, the car’s airbags had failed to deploy.

(The two of them filed a product liability lawsuit against BMW for nearly $15 million dollars on the argument that the airbags, ultimately, would have saved his life. They won the suit and used the money to buy a new house and create the Adam Richardson Foundation, which I always found very tacky. Adam would’ve thought it gauche.)

I digress. Teir fantasy of something else, yet to be discovered, that would finally offer them a miraculous sense of peace could only exist due to the MIA notebooks. If Penelope and Jack had been able to crack them open the first day after the funeral, they would have been left to mourn their son the way any other parent in the mostly-illiterate 21st century would. In fact, there had already been issues with both Frances and his parents after reading his older entries left in the 5 notebooks I didn’t touch, many of which contained details of women he had had relations with, drugs he had done, and petty grievances he had with most of the people he knew. My name popped up a few times, but these notebooks in particular had been from the ages 17 to 19, so I only knew him around the tail end of the last notebook. He had not known Frances yet, and still the abandoned songs about the beautiful clerk at the grocer or the girl he slept with in high school upset her. Sometimes, they upset me, too.

When I think of myself, then, so much younger and all those years ago, I am horrified. I distinctly recall an instance in which they all stumbled across a song he wrote about an awful fight he had with Penelope when he was nineteen about his biological father and how much he “hated” her afterwards. With the other notebooks gone they could not move forward to read of his forgiveness; of how he had not died believing this. At the time I neither blamed myself for any of the excess grief nor did I think I held any responsibility for it whatsoever even if I look back with a unique sense of potent disgust at my deliberate contribution to this sort of arrested development he seemed to gain posthumously– in fact, I spent the year after his death increasingly offended that they had even dared to open any of the notebooks in the first place.  Frances and I, in the immediate wake of his passing and before his funeral, were to go through those five notebooks of his I had left untouched and pick out song lyrics to display on the funeral programs. Penelope not-so-subtly encouraged me to read something he had written at the service. This, to me, was idiotic. I did not hide my disdain for the idea. No presentation of anything Adam had ever written would appear impressive if it was me delivering it, monotone and only with the faintest hint of his voice present somewhere in the rafters of the church. Most of the discussion of the notebooks around me happened within the first week after his death, before the funeral and two days after his death when his parents flew to Seattle for twenty-one hours to go through some of his things with Frances and I. 

“Did he stop writing in notebooks recently?” Jack asked me while I stood around and looked at how many things had been boxed up in just the few hours that they’d been in Seattle, before I had come over. Twenty-four years, roughly six of them spent in Seattle with me, neatly and tidily packaged. They had made a box for me, even. Charity, J & P Cellar, Frances, Mike. I moved an ashtray from Charity to Mike. 

“Maybe,” I replied, not looking over at him. Frances and Penelope were in Adam’s bedroom, probably having the exact same conversation that we were having for the umpteenth time that week. “I don’t know.”

Only to me was the lie so bold-faced. How absurd, that I wouldn’t know something so minute and mundane about Adam. I knew everything and had the nastiest habit of even answering personal questions that other people asked of him, for him, in front of him. Frances, earlier that week, had asked me the same question and essentially followed it up with that same sentiment– I’m surprised you don’t know. I acted troubled by the fact this was seemingly the only one thing I did not know about him and it immediately garnered pity enough for everyone to drop it (around me, at least). Penelope and Jack enveloped me in a hug; Frances held my hand and reassured me when we smoked a cigarette later that night on his fire escape. I could not stop counting the cigarette butts with the hopeful little thunderbird alongside the ones with the neat Marlboro serif in the ashtray on the wrought iron. Mine were outnumbering his. All of the American Spirit butts would one day be swept away by whoever moved in next. That night, when I returned to my apartment for the night, I moved the notebooks to lay side-by-side, flat on the wooden slats of my bed frame, underneath the left side of my mattress. To this day, I am still surprised that I did not go through them that night. 

         Because I wanted to save money, I decided to drive to Missoula for the funeral and had failed to consider that I would have to take the same roads that Adam had driven a few days prior. Going through Ritzville, I thought of closing my eyes the whole way. Every time I passed something that glinted in the high, hot sun, I wondered if it had come off his car, if I should pull off on the shoulder to look around the grass for that one missing notebook. Every blade of grass the whole way through Adams County had a strand of his hair tangled around it, in my mind. I laughed like a lunatic as I sped along in my car when I first saw the county sign that caught me off guard, a tinny voice in my head crowing Adam died in Adams County! Adam died in Adams County! 

The first time I cried about it all came at the wake when I saw him in the suit he was wearing. I was outraged they hadn’t taken something from his clothes in Seattle– that they hadn’t asked me what he would have wanted to be wearing. He would have hated it, he would have hated every single thing about it, and when Frances and Penelope tried to hug me; when Jack was telling me he loved me like a son and Adam had loved me like a brother, I couldn’t even tell them I was crying because of the suit they had picked. At the funeral proper, I hadn’t prepared anything to say and decided to just tell the story of how he and I had met and talked for far, far too long. Some of our friends from college spoke, and it is still the last time that I’ve seen or spoke to any of them. It was stilted and awkward and irreflective of the version of him who had died. Frances did not speak. Adam’s biological father, whom he had not seen since he was five, attended– when I saw him, I somehow knew it was him before Penelope said anything. To see the same features Adam had weathered with age that I would never see on Adam himself (blue eyes slightly milky and wrinkled around the edges) was as awful as the anger I felt on Adam’s behalf that he had even dared come in the first place. No one else seemed to be as offended by his presence and it soured even the miserable grief I had settled into by that point. I did not want to stay in Adam’s house with Jack and Penelope and Frances and returned to Seattle immediately that night. I took a week off of work and tried to adjust to the fact that I suddenly had nowhere to go, no one to see, nothing to do whatsoever. 

And then there is the matter of Frances. In the weeks that followed, when we started talking more often, she and I didn’t do anything further than ending up lying mostly-drunk on the floor of my apartment after a night of talking. Nearly every time this happened, I would promise her that we would go out for dinner or something more mature the next time. Frances, though, thought what we were doing was endearing of me– wild; bohemian. I had just wanted to be a good friend, and I liked the conversation. She had enough stories about Adam I’d never heard and I had enough about him she’d never heard to keep us entertained for hours. They had met outside of one of his shows around Christmastime and were seeing each other proper by January. By May, he was gone. It was easy to see why he had loved her, but I loved her for different reasons. Where Adam enjoyed her independence and desire to spend time with her other friends, she had slowly stopped talking to them as much as I had no other friends to talk to, and we spent this absurd amount of free time together. Around him, she had been soft-spoken and cheeky, but with me she never stopped treating me like a stupid boy that had developed a crush on his brother’s girlfriend. It worked for us. 

By June, we spent time during daylight hours together, too, and she called me one afternoon to come to her apartment because she needed my help with something. Her apartment was a place free from grief and was mostly untouched by Adam. She lived with three friends she met in college who had not known Adam at all other than as her boyfriend, and the only relics of him in the apartment existed as a bouquet of dried wildflowers he’d picked her at some point, a sweater of his she sometimes wore, and the framed lyrics from a song he wrote about her in her room. Like her, all of her roommates were artists, so every time I came over, there was something I was supposed to be wary of or step over when I was moving around. That visit, I had to scoot past a half-finished, full-body papier-mâché sculpture too close to the doorway when I arrived. She ushered me in and apologized for the mess as we walked towards her bedroom. None of her roommates were home.

“I was hoping you’d be able to help me cut my hair,” she finally told me, not quite sheepish, but with that nearly mischievous sort of expression. “I usually do it every week. I just haven’t had someone to cut it for a while now, so it’s getting too long, and it always bothers me when it gets too much on my neck like this…”

It was an extremely roundabout way to phrase the fact that Adam was the one who cut her hair every week, but her hair was now too long after nearly two months of neglect due to him being dead. I nodded before I could think much else of it. 

"Of course. I mean, I cut my own hair. I cut Adam’s.”

That was that. She and I went to the cramped little bathroom down the hallway and she asked me if I minded if she removed her blouse. We stood there, on the checkerboard tile with the window open and the noise of the traffic on I-5 wafting in, with her in her shorts and bra. As I combed down her mousy brown hair and slicked it flat on her head; cutting straight across high on the nape of her neck, we didn’t talk. When I finished up the back, she told me she could do her bangs herself, so I sat on the side of the bathtub and watched her bare feet amongst the fallen locks of hair on the tile because it felt more polite. Upon finishing, she put down the scissors and I removed my attention from the butterfly tattoo on her left ankle and her red toenail polish. 

“Does it look alright?” 

I nodded. “I think so. It does. I just hope I did an alright job is what I mean.”

That made her smile, and she looked closer in the mirror for a moment before turning to me. I handed her a mirror so she could look at the back of her head, and she barely glanced at it before placing the mirror back down on the edge of the sink. 

She kissed me, then, standing in the hair on the floor. The kiss was tentative and almost teenaged in nature, and I put my hand on her waist when I pulled away after merely a moment. At this, she put her hand by her mouth, brows knit. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking genuinely stricken. She must have felt terrible at that moment when all I felt was shock. I shook my head, which seemed to relieve her, but when I moved backwards slightly, that only seemed to trouble her more. 

“No, Frances, it’s okay,” I assured her before she started speaking again as she had been gearing up to. “I don’t think we should do this now.”

“So another time?” She had asked me. That moment had truly been the first time I had considered any of these things– I had not once looked at her in that way or thought anything more of her than as an acquaintance, really, until she had morphed into a friend over the weeks leading up to that point. A combination of her apologeticness and hope moved me, though, and once I was in that state of mind I found that I really would not mind perhaps being casually intimate with her. Really, I had never expected to know Frances for so long. If Adam never died, they would have broken up, and even after he did, there was a short while where I assumed she and I would fall out of contact until we barely talked– if we ever did– past a certain point. There was still a part of me, then, that thought this. That what tethered us together would eventually dry up, and so would we. So I nodded, and I told her yes, and I said that we had to wait until it made a little more sense and it wasn’t so “soon”. As far as that afternoon went, though, I swept up the hair in the bathroom and made us Bloody Marys while she showered. 

It went on like this. She and I, on occasion, would have sex. In late September, when the air was already cool and the sun sparse, she came over. On her person were two bottles of wine she said had been on sale. We sat cross-legged on my floor like children waiting for instruction, only there was no parent; no teacher. The wine sat unopened on my table. We were just talking. About him, mostly. Of course. She was going on and on about the notebooks again and asked me if I ever wondered what was in the ones that had been “lost”. I didn’t answer right away, and she continued. 

"I mean, don’t you think it’s a little weird? It seems so deliberate. I agree with Penelope about it, at least. It’s like he got rid of them, and then suddenly he dies.”

I shrugged and sighed a little, only a quarter exasperated and finally giving up and standing to get myself a glass and pour myself a drink. “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll turn up.”
        She didn’t seem satisfied. “Penelope keeps tearing up his room at home thinking she missed them. I feel like he put them somewhere weird. Underneath his floorboards or something.”

Or under my bed. I actually thought, then, how in the hell Frances and subsequently everyone else would even begin to react if I had cracked a huge smile in that moment and told Frances I had something really funny to show you, in fact. Oh, God. I didn’t, ever, feel any guilt about having kept them. Not once or even for a moment, and it was all because of the conversations like this. I knew none of them came from anything other than love, but, really, the more everyone thought that there was something that would fix or solve everything in those things, the more strongly I felt that I was the only person that should have had any of them in the first place. I didn’t go through them, I respected his nearly compulsive desire for privacy. There was not a single thing in any of them that could tell anyone anything that they shouldn’t have already known about Adam in the first place, I thought– that’s how I had felt about the pieces I had seen of the ones everyone had combed through, at least. 

Frances spoke again after I never replied to her prior statement. “I mean, I used to wonder what he was writing about me. Other than the song I have. I’ll just never know.”

I tilted my head back against my bookshelf and closed my eyes. Sure, I wondered the same thing, I suppose. I felt as if she was asking me question; like she expected me to say “yes” or “no”...to what, I had no clue. I knew she had to be written about, of course, but I didn’t think that was what she cared about. I wasn’t sure if whatever was written would be written in a way that she wanted or in a way that would have comforted her, and this conviction of mine was essentially baseless, but I was nearly certain for absolutely no reason.

“He never told me he loved me,” she continued, “not once.”

There was no bitterness when she said it, not at all. Just a sense of tired confusion. It was almost as if she couldn’t decide whether or not she felt truly hurt or merely unlucky. 

“He never said it to me,” I shrugged, “and I knew him for seven years. I just don’t think he was the sort.”

That made her turn to me, sharp-eyed and accusatory. “I thought you said–”

“I mean, I told him that I did. Love him. But of course I did, I don’t think that had to be said. I think I just am the type where you have to say things like that, or something. I was emotional about my parents or something, I think. It was after a party. I don’t think he was even tipsy at that point, he hadn’t had much to drink. He was getting over the flu. I was, though– drunk. We were on the roof of the terrible place we lived in second year at UDub and I just said it in a normal way, I guess. I wanted to be the type of person who told his friends he loved them. It’s really hard to work backwards to that when you reach a certain age, though. It just sounded awkward or like guys who get wasted and start yelling, like, “I love you, man!””

“What’d he say?”

"He just got so quiet I had thought that I offended him or something. But he stayed with me. We didn’t talk. Then he said he was tired and so we went to bed and we never talked about it again.”

Frances pulled her legs up, up towards herself and rested her chin on her knee. She talked for a long time about the two of them and how much he had made her feel loved but how she felt so cheated out of a longer relationship; how she would never know marriage with him or get to hear that declaration of love she was so certain was bound to come at any moment before he’d died. I didn’t pay much attention to it all and just read the wine label over and over again. Outside, someone yelled in the street. They sounded drunk, or delighted, or perhaps both. We both turned towards the window. She bit her tongue but then continued seamlessly when the street quieted again. I was disappointed that it hadn’t given us an excuse to stop talking. My head was beginning to hurt and I tried to make a big show of it, rubbing my temples and the bridge of my nose. 

“He did love you,” she told me eventually, her voice soft and sure in a way that churned my stomach unpleasantly. “He told me he did, when he talked about you.”

That almost did me in. The only time I ever cried in front of Frances was at the wake, but the second closest time was that night. I still don’t know why I didn’t ask her to elaborate– I wanted nothing more than to hear her describe, in detail, how he had loved me and in when he had said such a thing. How drunk he was when he said it. How often, how tenderly, how flippantly, any and all of it. It felt greedy, I suppose, so I gave her what she wanted so we could just wrap the night up and she could go home. 

“He loved you too.”

"Did he tell you?” She asked, hopeful. Suddenly, my words felt very cruel. 

"We didn’t talk about those things much,” I offered her. “I really think he did. He really just wasn’t the sort to talk about it. But I know you know, and I know, too.”

A week later, in October, I asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend.

Around our six-month anniversary and exactly on Adam’s one-year death-anniversary, Frances and I went out to dinner. Prior to us going, I had been to that Indian restaurant in downtown Seattle seven times with Adam, and since Frances and I went, I haven’t been back. 

"I’ve never paid for a meal here before,” Frances laughed, like it was something awkward she had to bring up before we got too ahead of ourselves. I scanned the menu– I knew what I wanted, already– because I could feel her eyes desperately running up and down my face like she was trying to gauge whether or not what she said was right or wrong. We split every meal we ever got together. 

Before I could even mull over the statement, I replied under my breath, raising my eyebrows like I was half-amused: “Yeah, me neither.” This was the wrong comment to make, I would find out later. Frances turned her freckled, pointy nose up in the air; red at the tip from the cold outside. If she weren't across the table from me, pristine white tablecloth the channel between us, I’d have kissed that raw skin. It was difficult to ignore. Only when she looked back down did I realize how profusely her nose was running, and I changed my mind. She swiped the cloth napkin that she had failed to put in her lap across her upper lip, and then placed it back on the table. 

Our meal went on. She laughed at my jokes and I pretended to wipe a tear from my eye at one of hers. Grape leaves were served on spoons; lamb Biryani in a triangular dish. Two Bombay White Negronis in for me, three glasses of Malbec for her, I said I needed to use the restroom and got up. Really, I did use the bathroom. Afterwards, though, I wandered around the restaurant. I purposely got lost around the back, by the door to the kitchen and a storage closet which I peered into to investigate the contents: a rolled up rug, surplus tealights. Waitstaff came out of the kitchen door and gave me a sideways glance, so I stepped out the staff exit for some fresh air. Outside, I smoked one and a half cigarettes just down to the thunderbird and walked around to the front and back again. After some back and forth with myself, I valiantly decided not to cry. 

While I was gone, Frances had drank another glass of wine. She looked upset with me, to the point I could gauge this immediately when I was usually totally oblivious to those kinds of things. When angry, she tended to place the tip of her tongue behind her upper lip, resting on her left front tooth, making her nostril flare. To me, it always looked as if she was trying to unstick something from between her teeth, like I was some uncomfortable, lingering morsel of food. Most often when she was upset, it was because of something I had done. I sat back down and she nearly knocked over her wine as she reached for her glass again, taking a greedy, performative gulp. 

"How many times did you come here with Adam?” Her words were slurred and low, and she looked down at the table. To keep myself busy, I thumbed the tablecloth. Was it so obvious I had been here before? What had allowed her to arrive at that conclusion so easily, just with a few moments alone to think? 

“Five,” I replied as quickly as I could. Frances’ lip curls up in a mean, despondent sort of smile anyway.

“Did he take you?” 

“Yeah.”

She was silent for a moment and pretended to adjust her fork before it and her knife gracelessly clattered onto the tablecloth, smearing a vivid stripe of turmeric across the fabric. I remember this moment more vividly than most birthdays of mine, more than Adam’s funeral, even. Hair fell out of her barrette and into her face, and she hiccuped before declaring: “I’m so sick of feeling like you know more about him than I do.”
        “Frances,” I tried immediately, mostly baffled by her sudden intensity. My voice took on that sort of placating quality, like I was talking to a troubled child. In all honesty, I wanted her to say such a thing. Yes, you know nothing. We needed each other. Now, didn’t that make sense? Ought she now to excuse my outbursts, my awful behavior now that she understood I hadn’t just lost a part of me– I lost my preoccupation, my ability to do any one-thing, any-thing entirely. “He’s my best friend. I knew him for six years.”
        “He was my boyfriend. Jesus Christ.” 

Both of us tried to ignore this no matter how incredibly important it was. To center myself, I tried to remember the fact that I really thought I ought to marry Frances. She would understand things as long as we lived and didn’t mind how I didn’t have money, or the superfluous amount of shoes that piled up by the door. Frances would swoon at my proposition of honeymooning in France or Italy, because I had decided to marry Frances. All of it would be good; could continue on towards goodness as long as I moved forward. At night, when I could not breathe because of all of the dreams and hopes and desires gumming up my heart and throat, my hand could wander to her hip bone underneath the covers. My eyes could stay closed as I rubbed up-and-down, wading through the shallow waters of my devastation. The moment would break when she would turn to face me, stirring in her sleep, and I would hear a soft, feminine breath escape her lips or a curl of her hair would brush my cheek. 

Perhaps only out of a similar desire to self-soothe, I reached out for her hand across the table. She did not take it and instead propped her face up with her hand, elbow on the table. As it became more apparent she would not interlace our fingers, I moved to awkwardly place my hands back into my napkined lap. Frances rubbed at her eyes like she wanted to look up and see that I had disappeared, the black kohl of her makeup blurring the sharp contours of her appearance; presenting herself to me as a smudged charcoal sketch. Even if I knew she was cross with me, I couldn’t find it in me to be upset. Instead, I was embarrassed at her drunkenness, and I looked around the restaurant to see if anyone was privy to the moment we were having.

When I saw our waiter coming by with a pitcher of water, I reached up to wave him away. No, not right now, my gesture was supposed to say. In retrospect, the movement must have looked so snobbishly dismissive that merely the memory still manages to make my face burn. Frances, at the flick of my hand, twisted her head to see who I was looking at, and scoffed at the retreating back of our server before turning back in her seat and laughing to herself. 

She threw her hands up in defeat. I sat up, face pinched in confusion and nose scrunched like I had smelled something foul. I tried to school my expression and offer her some soothing words, but they didn’t come to me. She did not say anything else, and instead sat further back in her own chair, defeated, and covered her face as she began to weep and apologize. In one fell swoop, I had to collect the bill, pay, and then stand outside and call a taxi when I found I was much too drunk to drive home and would have to leave my car there. Frances stood against me as we waited, pressed firmly against the crook of my neck. I could feel her breathing deeply; the shaking, rattling breaths in her chest. She cried harder after a moment, and it was only when she was nosing the collar of my shirt in the backseat of the car that I realized I was wearing Adam’s old Hermès cologne. 

The next morning, she came to my apartment with a bottle of champagne. A gift to celebrate our anniversary. As I squeezed oranges to make us mimosas in some sort of domestic fantasy that I was conjuring up as I stood there, she sat on the counter. I was looking forward to being (at the very least) tipsy. Thank God, I thought. After she had profusely apologized for the previous night, I kissed her and told her some gentle words that were intended to make her feel like she could stop talking about it altogether. This was successful, and she took to wandering around my kitchen to make us something to eat alongside the alcohol I knew damn well she had not meant for us to drink the hour she brought it over. After we ate, I assumed she would want to have sex. I attempted to come up with reasons while we couldn’t or mustn’t. I was itching to speak as she toasted too-hard bread and cut thick slabs of butter for my slices, scraping minuscule shavings onto her own. 

"You’re good at that,” she commented absently, standing behind me and putting her arms around my waist as she peered around me to watch the way I wrung the pulpy skin of the orange around the juicer, the god-awful one I had gotten from the Salvation Army back in college. Her hair was growing out. She had not asked me to touch it up for her in nearly two months. 

I bullied the useless skin of the orange against the citrus press as I talked. “Adam was terrible at it. With any sort of juicer, really. Did he ever tell you about when we went to his uncle’s house in Kalispell?”

“...No, I don’t think so.”

“His uncle– Jack’s brother– needed someone to watch his dogs and house for a week. He’s an umpire for the MLB and travels all around, I guess. But, we were on spring break, and he told Adam he could stay in the house and invite friends in return. It was on the river, and the dogs were the easiest in the world to take care of. All we had to do was feed them twice a day, and let them out once a day– into his huge backyard– and then let them back in. We didn’t even have to clean up after them since they would go out far enough. So we just laid around for a week in this huge house. It was still too cold to do anything outside, but we tried– you know, laying out on the deck when the UV hit 6 and it was still barely getting to 50 degrees and trying to tan before we went back to school, things like that. We kayaked down Flathead high one afternoon and I flipped my kayak trying to get off of it right by the shore. That’s, well, that’s what that scar down on my foot is from. Yeah, right on the arch, there. Stepped on something real sharp. He carried me back to the house, I bled all down his leg. Oh, God.

But, well, anyway. We had brought all this booze, and his uncle had also let us have free reign of whatever was in his liquor cabinet, so we were just drinking from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to sleep. It sounds way worse than it was. His uncle, though, had this huge…Well, I guess it would be like a cookbook, but for cocktails. Everything we wanted to make had all this citrus in it…. It was still early when we decided on making something that needed oranges and a lemon that evening, so I gave him this big job of walking into town and getting the oranges and lemon so we could make it before dinner. It was mostly just to give him something to do because I wanted to make dinner. But, you know Adam, he just got lost– I called him nearly thirty times, I swear to God, and it wouldn’t go through– and he was gone for four or five hours or something insane and by the time he got back it was getting dark already and I was well on my way with dinner. He just felt bad about it, I think he had wanted to watch a movie or something and he got all upset that he had ruined whatever plans he had sort of invented in his own head for the afternoon. 

To make him feel better I asked if he would just juice everything he had gotten for me while I finished dinner. I was making us some sort of elaborate eggplant rice kebab dish…I remember because I fucked up the eggplant and Adam still thought it was good. I wasn’t watching what he was doing at all, we were drunk and listening to music, God, old Leonard Cohen. Songs of Leonard Cohen, yeah. But I look over at him, and he’s just– first of all, he’s doing the absolute worst job at juicing everything. He was using one of those handheld ones, you know? The, the clamp sort. And he’s juicing it all into the same dish. I’m just, like, Adam, what the hell are you doing? And I can’t stop laughing. He just– He looks over at me like I had done something crazy, but then he goes, oh, Jesus, I should’ve been putting these in separate containers, probably. But it was weird, because I thought of my parents. If I had done that in front of them, I would’ve, I don’t know. They would’ve yelled. Instead of that, though, Adam and I just cracked up laughing. I laughed even harder to show him I wasn’t mad, or something like that, so he started laughing pretty hard, too, and I told him he could just keep going the way he had been, it didn’t matter. He already felt so bad about getting lost, and then that…I, well. We drank Sidecars for the rest of the trip until the lemon orange juice ran out, but we ran out of cognac, his uncle’s nice cognac, so we had to get him a new bottle, it cost a fortune…”

She didn’t say anything for a long while after I trailed off, just rested her chin on my shoulder and watched my hands wrench the rest of the pulp free, the juicer squeaking. 

"That sounds nice,” she murmured, voice so soft near my ear. 

“God. I miss him. Can’t even juice an orange.” My voice sounded so obnoxious compared to her own. 

She pulled back, then, and navigated around me to fetch the champagne. She twisted the foil and the wire cage in silence and then shot me an apologetic, embarrassed look before popping the cork. I watched the bottle start to drool onto the floor with my lips pressed tight together.

We went to the farmer’s market one Sunday, a day otherwise inconsequential besides from the fact that it was the day before I decided to end things between us. It had been raining all morning, but by the time we were walking back from the market that afternoon, the sky was merely the color of old cotton. We weren’t talking much. It was the sort of silence I thought we had come to appreciate in one another: companionable, like we were on a long road trip and knew neither would be offended if we kept to ourselves. Later, at home, I put away the groceries while she started dinner. She talked about an email she had gotten from her landlord and whether or not it was time to break her lease. I hummed and nodded at all the right times, and she eventually retired that avenue of conversation and instead moved to dancing around the kitchen while she cooked to a playlist she had made for a ceramics class she was teaching. She over-salted the sauce and blamed me for distracting her. I wiped the stove. She poured wine. We ate on the couch and watched something I barely registered, just because ten minutes in I had decided I wouldn’t be into it. Afterwards, she painted, then returned to the couch where I was reading only to fall asleep with her head on my thigh before it was even midnight. 

When I slipped out from under her, I already knew what I was going to do. I hadn’t made a decision or knew for any reason other than the fact that once I got up, I just knew. 

I pulled the notebooks out from under my bed and sat on the floor, on my haunches, the way I would sit as a child when I was trying to build something. I opened them, one by one, and read every single one I had, start to finish. It took me a while. I don’t know how long.

There is no eloquent way to describe how I felt after reading those three notebooks. I do not feel the need to itemize the content of them all, nor do I feel like it’s particularly important. They were like the others: the same cramped handwriting, plenty illegible, the same red covers worn soft from use and eaten up at the corners. What I had expected, I think, was to find myself. Some accounting of me through years’ worth of writing both incidentally and forthrightly about my habits, my failings, my humor, the roof at UDub, Kalispell, any of it. The kind of centrality I had assumed time and time again through my relationship with Adam. Instead, he had loved Frances so dearly and explicitly that I began to shake violently and read the remaining pages with the notebooks pinned to the floor with my elbows. He had loved his parents. He had written about a dog he saw on the street in Los Angeles (a trip I did not know he had taken), a whole page about this dog, because it had reminded him of a dog he’d had as a boy. He mentioned me in the way he mentioned the weather, present and unremarkable and simply the atmosphere of a life that was being lived besides, underneath, embracing, and despite it.

I tried, yes, to find the version of this that reflected well on me, or at least cast me neutrally. Included me. I could not locate this. What I had done was take something that was not mine, like a petulant and stupid child, because I had decided I deserved it more than anyone. I had stolen the notebooks, it had been a year since he had died, and I had seemingly killed some part of Adam from my own perverse selfishness. That is not grief. I had lost someone and something I would never recover, but I had also taken, greedily and perversely. I had done a terrible thing.

The tears came once I finished reading; when I could close the covers and sit, concentrated wholly on willing the wetness to spring from my eyes. I had to concentrate — actually will them forward, the way you might will yourself to sneeze — but they came, and then more than that, and I cried and heaved into a pillow until my body had nothing left to give. Afterwards I lied there feeling, above everything else, relieved. Finally, I thought. I’ve done it correctly.

The next day, I broke up with Frances and stuffed the notebooks in the stiff pockets of a leather jacket of his at the back of her closet in the hopes she’d find them one day. It was the last time I spoke to her, and I never spoke to his parents again. I quit smoking and learned how to juice oranges without an inclination to speak about him even if I thought it all, even if I thought it all the same.