cleared my throat, pausing purposefully. Gabe bounced the mattress impatiently, which made me laugh. “Come on!” he said. “Tell me.”
I read it out loud, and Gabe cheered like we’d won the lottery. Then he pushed me back against the mattress. I laughed again as he kissed me all over.
“I love you more than life itself,” I said.
“Ditto,” he said. “You are my forever.”
We cast the vase aside and tangled our bedsheets again. Then Gabe grabbed a permanent black marker and wrote Tegan & Gabe’s Jar of Spontaneity on the vase’s crystal-clear surface.
Holding the vase now, I don’t feel giddy or joyful. I feel heavy, sluggish with misery.
“Pick something out,” Gabe says softly. “Actually, pick three things, okay?”
“Why?” I ask, my bitterness seeping out. “What’s the point, Gabe?”
“The point is life, Tegan. It’s going to carry on, whether you want it to or not. And eventually you need to join back in.”
“No one understands.” I’m crying now. “Trust me, if there were some kind of switch I could flick I would. In a second. I want my life back, too.”
“I know you do, love. I know.” Gabe’s voice lulls me, the gentleness of his tone washing over me.
“But even if I hop a plane somewhere far from here, I can’t get away from it,” I say. “I can’t run away from my broken heart, Gabe. Or my broken body.”
“You’re right. So don’t think about it as running away from something. More running toward something,” he suggests. The look on my face says it all. “I know, I know. Hear me out, okay?” I shrug, keeping my eyes on the jar.
“Nothing can change...” His voice cracks and I imagine his Adam’s apple bobbing repeatedly, the way it does when he tries to swallow his emotions. “Nothing can change what happened. And staying here, reliving it every moment of every day, is breaking you, Tegan. You’re disappearing on us, and I’m afraid soon there won’t be any of you left.”
I don’t say it out loud, but that’s exactly what I’m hoping for. One day I’ll simply cease to exist, like a puff of smoke. There one moment, gone the next.
“But pulling something out of that vase? It’s going to force you to live. To create a new memory. And I feel like if you can do that, just make one new memory that isn’t sad, it will be easier to make another one. Then another one. And soon you’ll have a stack of happy memories to help balance the sad ones.”
As much as I’ve committed to my disappearing act, Gabe’s words spark in me the tiniest flicker of something. I’m not sure, but it feels different. Fresh, like a clean, fluffy towel, or biting into a tomato straight off the vine.
“And there’s all that money from my parents from the wedding, just sitting in our bank account. Doing nothing but gathering a pathetic amount of interest,” he says.
“I think your parents expected us to do something a little more grown-up with that money,” I reply. Gabe’s parents wrote us a check for $200,000 as a wedding gift, surely intending it to go into a house in the suburbs. A proper place to raise their grandson.
“Who cares what they want us to do with it? I can’t think of a more perfect way to spend some of it.”
I give a small smile and run my fingers gently over the black lettering on the vase, taking care not to rub it off.
“You need a change of scenery, Teg,” Gabe says. “You’re going to lose yourself if you stay here. And I can’t let that happen.” He sighs heavily. “Besides, school’s out in a few months and then you have the summer off.” Not that I’m going back to work anytime soon. Medical leave has turned into stress leave, buying me at least the rest of the school year. “The timing couldn’t be better.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “The thought of leaving this apartment exhausts me. Getting on a plane?” I shake my head.
“We can do this,” he says. “I’ll be with you the whole time. And I promise not to let you snore or drool if you fall asleep on the plane.” He laughs, and I feel the familiar pull of love, despite everything. “You need this, Teg. We need this.”
I look at him, then take a deep breath as I dig into the vase, stirring the papers. “Three things?”
Gabe nods.
I pull out the first one and set it down on the duvet, hands shaking. It’s the one we agreed on for our honeymoon. The trip we put off when we found out I was pregnant.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Gabe says, surprise in his voice. “Think it’s a sign?”
I shrug. Maybe. Though I don’t believe in that much anymore.
Reaching back in the vase, I pull out another one, and then one more. I carefully unfold the last two papers and smooth out the folds, taking my time lining up the small squares side by side.
Gabe starts humming a tune I recognize, breaking into song for the chorus. “We’re leaving...on a jet plane...”
There’s so much optimism in his voice, and I can’t stomach it.
I put my head in my hands and sob.
Three weeks before the accident
I stared at the gift and chewed my lip distractedly as I tried to sort out how to wrap it. It was Gabe’s twenty-seventh birthday, and I’d gone way over our agreed-upon budget for presents. We had two rules about birthday gifts: they had to be sentimental in some way, and they couldn’t cost more than a hundred dollars. We started the rules way back when we were broke, just out of school and looking for jobs. At the time, even a hundred had seemed extravagant. But now that we were properly husband and wife, with a bank account a lot more flush thanks to Gabe’s parents, I felt justified breaking the rule.
The guitar was a limited edition—a flame-red Gibson Les Paul. I couldn’t wait for him to open it. I knew once he saw it he wouldn’t care how much it cost—which, for the record, was way over the hundred-dollar limit. If only I could figure out how to wrap a guitar—and an amp—with the one roll of paper I had on hand.
Gabe would likely say he wasn’t good enough yet to deserve such a guitar, but he’d been taking lessons every week with the beat-up, secondhand acoustic guitar my brother Jason had given him.
I unrolled the jumbo-sized roll of wrapping paper and laid it out on our bedroom floor. Gabe would be home soon from work, and I wanted to have everything ready. The beef bourguignon simmered on the stove, its rich, heady aroma filling the apartment, and the garlic-and-blue-cheese mashed potatoes were ready to go. I’d picked up Gabe’s favorite dessert from a little bakery down the street—a meringue pavlova, piled high with clouds of whipped cream and strawberries, which looked amazingly fresh and succulent despite the winter season.
