The Lie(71)

“But it’s your story. I want to know, Natasha. And I’ll tell you mine.”

I swallow down more of the wine, not sure if I want to hear his either. Then again, it’s Brigs and he’s laying his heart bare for me. How can I not take him for everything?

When I don’t say anything, he goes on. “After they died, we had a funeral of course. I saw people I hadn’t seen in years. It was beautiful, really, the ceremony. Obviously it’s something you never appreciate at the time. How can you? But looking back now, it really did Hamish and Miranda justice. It’s taken me years, though, to be able to reflect on it with just sadness and nothing more, mind you.” He sighs deeply. “Anyway, I, uh…well. I lost myself. Completely. And I still don’t know how I’m not down on my kitchen floor, absorbing in the enormity of it all, you know? I really didn’t think I’d get out of it. It still surprises me that I’m here.”

He chews on his lip for a moment, his eyes pained before taking another drag of the cigar. “I tried to kill myself, you know.”

My heart slams against my chest, aching. “What?” I ask in quiet disbelief.

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “I guess I should say it was a half-hearted attempt. The doctors gave me pills to sleep. I took a lot. I knew what I was doing too. I woke up in a pile of vomit, halfway to the bathroom. And you know what I felt? Relief at first, that it didn’t work, that I was alive. But then the fucking pain…it comes at you so hard. And that was the very thing I was trying to escape.” He exhales. “I never tried to do it again but…I often think about it. If I had succeeded.”

“I am so, so sorry,” I cry out softly, putting my hand on his. My soul weeps for him, the guilt overpowering me once again.

He looks at me with hard eyes. “Don’t be sorry, Natasha. They died. And that’s independent of you. It’s independent of us. I’m learning how to separate the two.”

He makes it sound so easy but from his strained brow, I know it’s anything but.

“But,” he goes on, “I couldn’t quite pull myself out of it right away. I lost my job at the university. I lost most of my friends. The suicide didn’t work but in some ways I was still trying to make myself as dead as possible. I barely ate. Barely slept. I was barely anything. You wouldn’t have recognized me. I was just…a ghost.”

I’m staring at him open-mouthed, reeling for him. Reeling for me. The wounds are too fresh and new. “So was I.”

“So tell me,” he says, passing me back the cigar. He looks me over, like a puzzle he’s trying to piece together. “How did you get on after?”

I turn the cigar over in my hands, taking in a deep breath. I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it but if I can’t be ready with Brigs, now, I’ll never be ready. “I think…it’s hard to talk about it. Not because I’m afraid, or it’s too painful, even though it is painful and I am afraid. It’s just that, I had two things competing for my sorrow. I had the guilt of their deaths…”

“I wish I never said those things to you,” he quickly says, voice choked. “There’s not a day I don’t regret it, putting the blame on you. I was…”

“You were in shock and you were in pain.”

“Don’t make excuses for me.”

“Don’t find something else to feel bad over,” I tell him. “It’s not an excuse, it’s just the truth. I don’t blame you. I would have probably said the same, I would have gone mad with grief. I would have lashed out at anyone. It’s just that you…you fucking broke my heart, Brigs. You gave me guilt and you broke me in two. I was dying from both.”

His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he swallows hard. “I’m so sorry,” he says thickly.

“We’re both sorry, Brigs,” I tell him. “That’s why I don’t want us to talk about it more than we have to. We’re fucked up. Sincerely, completely fucked up.”

He sighs and looks back at the sea. “Aye.”

“Anyway,” I tell him after a few beats, taking a quick puff of the cigar, feeling my lips buzz. “I dropped out of school and I went to France. My father seemed like the only person I could go to, you know? My mother wouldn’t have given a shit about me in LA. She still barely contacts me and I’ve kind of stopped trying. But my father, I knew he would help me. And you know what? He did. I went to Marseilles and lived with him and his girlfriend and tried to live again. I learned French. I got a job cleaning boats during the summer. I even went to a therapist, in French and all. There was medication and a lot of setbacks. I have bad panic attacks from time to time. But slowly I pulled myself out of the hole. And…I did everything I could not to think about you.”