Happiness for Beginners (12 page)

“Then, what?”

“Then I give up and listen for a while before I hang up.”

“You
listen
?” I said. “Can you hear anything?”

“Well, on a good day, I can hear everything.”

“But that's eavesdropping! That's morally wrong,” I said, wondering what on earth he'd heard me say.

“Hey!” he said. “You're the one calling me.”

“Not on purpose!”

“Nonetheless.”

“Have I ever said anything—” I started.

“Incriminating?” he finished.

I nodded into the phone.

“Nah,” he said. “It's always just grocery checkers. Or your hairdresser. Or your pet. Sounds like you got a dog that eats your furniture.”

I nodded again. “A mini dachshund. She's terrible.”

“Get rid of it. Life's too short.”

“Why didn't you tell me I'd been pocket-dialing you?”

“I didn't think you'd want to hear from me before.”

“But now you think I do?”

“I hope so,” he said. “Plus I want to thank you for yesterday. For being so kind.”

“It was nothing.”

“It wasn't nothing to me.”

I opened a bag of potato chips, and several spilled on my lap.

“I take it you haven't left yet,” he went on.

“Correct,” I said, crunching the chips.

“Are you sure you're up for this?”

“No,” I said, the honesty of the word fluttering over me like a breeze. “But there's no turning back now.”

“Sure there is,” Mike said. “There's always turning back.”

“I'm not so sure that's true.”

“Duncan seems genuinely concerned about your safety on this trip.”

“You talked to Duncan?”

“He says these guys are notorious for killing people. They recruit the dumbest possible thrill-seekers and then don't supervise them.”

“They're under new management.”

“There are many excellent survival courses out there,” Mike said, like he had any authority to judge. “This isn't one of them.”

“Guess you read about the bear attack.”

“No, but I did read about the rappelling accident. And the rockslide. And the guy who died from hypothermia.”

“I'll be fine,” I said, wondering if that was true.

“Why are you doing this?”

“If you survive, they might give you a Certificate.”

“Do you hear yourself talking?”

“I want that Certificate.”

“The thing is,” Mike said, “you're not exactly a jock.”

He wasn't wrong, but I resented the comment anyway. “I've been training for this for months,” I said, more irritated than I needed to be. “I've been running three miles every morning.”

“This is not a little jog around the neighborhood—”

“A
three-mile
jog,” I corrected.

“The fact that you're impressed with three miles proves my point. Seriously.”

“That's not funny.”

“I'm not joking.”

“Don't tell me I can't do this,” I said.

“Helen, you can't change who you are.”

“Sure I can.”

“It's just not like you to do stuff like this.”

“It didn't
used to be
like me,” I said then, “back when you knew me. But I've turned myself into an animal now. A bloodthirsty animal.”

“Why?”

“You don't want me to answer that.” I was regretting picking up the phone. Sometimes
anybody
really isn't better than
nobody
.

“Helen,” Mike said then, “you don't have to do this.”

“I do, actually. I really do.”

“I want you to come home.”

“I'm not coming home. I made a plan, and I'm following through.”

“No,” Mike said. “I mean, come home to me.”

I dropped the phone into my lap. And stared at it a second before I picked it back up.

“Are you still there?” Mike was asking. “Did I lose you?”

“I'm still here,” I said, but I wasn't sure I meant it.

“I mean it, Ellie. I really do.”

“I never liked it when you called me Ellie.”

“Hang up and come home. It's crazy that we're apart.”

It took a second to assemble a response. “We're not just apart, Mike. We're
divorced
. It's been a
year
. People don't get un-divorced. We signed papers, we officially ended it in every possible way.”

“I know, and I get that, and from a certain perspective it seems a little crazy—”

“From any perspective, it seems a lot crazy.”

“We made the choice we had to make at the time. But I'm better now. It took a hell of a wake-up call, but I pulled it together.”

“It wasn't a wake-up call. It was a legal document.”

My phone beeped. The battery was dying.

“I'm telling you,” Mike said. “I'm like the old me—but better. I can be good for you now, Ellie.”

I leaned my head back. It was just so perfectly like him to say the exact words I'd always longed to hear—but to wait until it was solidly too late.

He went on. “I've been dating constantly for the past six months—and guess what? Nobody can compare to you.”

“You've been dating constantly?” I asked.

“Haven't you?” he said. “Toby said you'd been on some dates.”

“One. With a Belgian insurance adjuster. I don't think it counts.”

“There's been nobody else? Really?”

Of course, there had been somebody. A vastly inappropriate somebody Mike himself had interrupted me with. Mike and Jake knew each other, of course, from many Thanksgivings and New Year's Eve parties at Grandma GiGi's, and I could have shocked the hell out of him if I'd said something about it right then, which was tempting. But I didn't. Partly because Mike and I really weren't close enough anymore to share anything that private. Partly because I wasn't sure myself if messing around with Jake had been kind of awesome or totally pathetic. And partly—though I never would have admitted this, even to myself—because something about that almost-night with Jake had cracked open a place so tender in my heart I knew I had no choice but to stand twenty-four-hour guard in front of it.

“I've had lots,
and lots,
of opportunities,” I said, “but I've been in a healing period.”

“I get that,” Mike said.

My phone battery beeped again.

“Come home,” Mike said then. “Why do you always have to be so hard on yourself?”

I hesitated. This was exactly our pattern, of course. Certain people in life—and not even always ones who deserve it—can just unlock all your doors, somehow. Even if you change the locks or hide the keys. And Mike had always been one of those people for me.

Until right now. It was time to be a tough guy. It was time to bare the fangs of my inner bloodthirsty beast. It was time to not just say
No,
but
Hell, no
.

I took a breath to do it, at last—but then, as if on cue, the battery died.

“Mike?” I said, even though I knew he was gone.

There was no answer.

It wasn't his fault, and I knew that. But I went ahead and added it to my long list of disappointments. That damned ex-husband. He never let me win.

*   *   *

I chewed the rest of my dinner in slow motion. I can't say that Mike's proposition didn't rattle me. If it had come a year ago, or even six months, I might have had a softer heart toward him. But it was too late now.
Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

I had an empty Coke can and two cheeks full of my last bite of Whoopie Pie and was just about to pack up and head back to the lodge, when the group—my group—came ambling up the sidewalk toward the hotel, tipsy.

They were all best friends already, in the way Mexican beer and salsa can make you friends. Windy, the one who kept flirting with Jake, called out to me on the approach. “We're going up to the roof to play Truth or Dare!” she said. “Want to come?”

Before I could think better of it, I slipped into Pickle mode with a sarcastic, “Seriously?”

The tone was way too mean, but she wasn't listening, anyway, because just then, one of the guys grabbed her from behind in a tickle, just like in a wine cooler commercial.

I hated them all already.

I tried to assess Jake without looking directly at him. Was he drunk, too? Was he going up to the roof, too? I stood up at the idea, and when I did, the wrappers from my shameful and tragic dinner fell to the ground. Busted. Dammit. But before I'd even bent down, there was Jake, at my feet, gathering them up. He stood, and stepped closer without meeting my eyes, and just when I thought he was going to hand me the whole pile of trash, he gently, almost tenderly, pulled one last thing—the Coke can—from my grasp and walked the bundle back to the trash bin at the corner.

I watched him, and I wasn't the only one. The whole group was waiting for him to come back, as if there was nowhere to go without him. As he turned back toward everyone, somebody shouted, “Move it, J-Dog!” and Jake ramped his walk up to a trot.

J-Dog?
He was already “J-Dog.”

Suddenly, I wanted a nickname. I wanted to be the kind of person that people gave nicknames to. How would my life be different if they all suddenly started calling me H-Dog? Okay, H-Dog didn't work—but
something
? I tried to remember if I'd ever had a good nickname. Duncan had about fifty for me, but they didn't count because I hated them all:
Helena, Helenita, Holla, Sis, Sistah, Sister Sledge, Sister Mister, Big Mama, Crazy Lady, La Loca, La Locita, Lena, Lane, Fast Lane
. He also thought I looked like an armadillo when I got mad, which gave rise to a whole cornucopia of irritating names, including
Dillo
and the dreaded
Dildo
. But nicknames I liked? I couldn't come up with one. Mike had sometimes called me
Mrs. Dull
after we got married, with no self-deprecating awareness at all, which kind of made my skin crawl, even though I never said that to him. After a while, he settled on Ellie, which never really fit me, somehow, but was a slight improvement. And Grandma GiGi called me
Darling,
but she called everybody
Darling
.

Oh, well. It was fine. I liked the name Helen.

I watched J-Dog jog back to the group. Somehow, he even made disposing of trash cool. Beckett would not have approved of that Whoopie Pie: the nuclear chemicals it was made with, the plastic it was wrapped in, the trucking industry that had brought it here from the factory in Kansas, or wherever. He could so easily have used me as an example to everyone—a consciousness-raising cautionary tale of bad food and littering. As it was, though, Jake had those wrappers hidden at the bottom of the trash before Beckett even noticed I was there.

I wasn't going up to the roof. I wasn't going to sit around up there watching a bunch of goofy kids play a goofy game. But just after Jake turned around, for no reason I could explain, I had this funny little spark of hope that he might tell them all to go on without him and stay here, instead, with me.

Which he didn't. Of course.

Jake was going up to the roof to drink beers at sunset and be his easy-going, optimistic self in the way you only can when you're twenty-two. And of course I was going to stay here alone. There was no other way it could play out.

Except for this: As Jake caught back up to everyone, he veered for the spot between the group and me, and I wondered just for a second if he might reach out, somehow, or find a way to brush against me as he went by. I allowed myself to hope for it just the tiniest bit—for the welcome human contact, for the acknowledgment that I was even here, for somebody out in this wild, empty land to have the slightest idea who I was.

But I shouldn't have let myself hope like that. Jake walked right on by without even a glance my way. Just exactly like a total stranger. The one I had ordered him to be.

 

Chapter 8

I was still half asleep when we boarded the bus the next morning—an old school bus that had been repainted green with the BCSC logo.

I chose a seat near the front and purposely sat right next to the aisle so nobody could sit beside me. Or, at least, so I could tell myself that's why nobody sat beside me. But then a skinny guy named Hugh wedged himself past me and sat down without even making eye contact. I stared at him until he asked, already seated, “Is this seat taken?”

“No.”

“It is now.”

I looked past him, out the window, even though it was still too dark to see.

“You were hilarious yesterday, by the way,” he said.

“I was hilarious?”

He nodded. “The sad kind of hilarious.”

I frowned. “Thank you.”

“You're my new favorite person here.”

“I am?” Something about his voice made it sound like everything he said actually meant the opposite.

He leaned in. “I had no idea this course would be such a frat party.”

I smiled. “Me, neither.”

As the kids loaded on one by one, Hugh leaned into me and whispered insults about each one, zeroing in immediately on everybody's most ridiculous and vulnerable traits: the ankle tattoo that said BFFs, the muffin top, the fake tans. He was sharp, I gave him that. And maybe a little mean. But I wasn't in a position to be picky.

The conversation on the bus was boisterous and cheery—all the kids raring to start their near-death and slimming adventures. I was the only person, as far as I could tell, who was terrified and subdued. Adrenaline prickled in my veins. I tried hard not to notice the way Jake was leading the frivolity, but, of course, the harder you try not to notice a thing, the more it becomes center stage in your mind. Especially when that thing is a person in the seat right behind yours.