the one your father liked but you drank most of.
âOkay, thatâs all. Iâm hanging up now.â
Charlotte Goodman takes a walk around her office building and wonders if anybody would really mind if she just ran away anddisappeared. Maybe sheâll go to Iceland. Make a brand-new start in Reykjavik. Sheâll be a modern-day Björk, a pioneer out there in the cold, reinventing herself. Sheâll take an interest in modern design, or sewing parkas, or whatever it is that Björk does.
To be honest, Iâd rather go to Italy than Iceland. But I canât go to Italy, because thatâs the place where Matthew and I were supposed to go.
Are
supposed to go. I donât even know the tenses anymore. Iâm not sure. I just know it was the honeymoon we were saving up for, one that we havenât taken and now most likely wonât.
I couldnât have been happier with the way we had our weddingâjust friends and family, hosted by our best-couple friends, Pete and Petra, in their backyard. We had already thrown all of our money into buying a house, a lovely little one-bedroom we nicknamed The Fort. It felt like our secret hideout. We treated it like one, too; the day after our wedding we made tater tots and hot dogs and sat on the floor of our kitchen to eat them, like we were having our first meeting in our clubhouse.
âFor richer or poorer,â Matthew had said, raising a tater tot as a toast.
âLet this be the poorer,â I added, knocking a ketchup-smeared potato bud against his.
We spent that first weekend as a married couple in bed, making love and eating hundreds of tater tots.
In this memory, Matthew looks larger than life in my head. All the best parts of him are illuminated, highlighted. I see his strong hands, the small upturn of his nose, his glasses. Thatâs how I know itâs not a true composite; Matthew had gotten Lasik surgery before the wedding. But the Matthew who wore glasses is the man I fell in love with, and when I see him inmy most cherished memories, I see him in his specs, pushed up too high on the bridge of his nose, always smudged on the lower right corner from his constant straightening. Black square frames that gave him a look of superiority that he often used to his benefit.
I didnât know how to tell him that after the surgery, I missed his glasses. He was so excited to be able to see everything, that there was one less thing for him to fiddle with, to worry about. He could wake up in the morning and jump right out of bed, if he wanted to. I loved how excited he could get about things. It didnât happen often, but when it did he had this little-kid face, full of wonder, so happy that something he had planned had worked out even better than he had assumed it would. That was when he was at his happiestâwhen he was absolutely as correct about something as possible. Itâs how he used to feel about us.
I still think we werenât a mistake, being together. At least not at first. When we first fell in love I kept feeling like Iâd found something Iâd been looking for. We had so much in common. Lots of
things
in common. We liked the same books, movies, music. We thought of visiting the same places. Thatâs how Italy came to represent the place weâd go once we got hitched. Our dreams meshed into one, our goals singular. It was no longer, âIâve always wanted to go to Italy.â It would become, âWe went to Italy together.â
I canât go to Italy now, no matter how much I want to disappear. Like the books and photographs and that one blue hoodie we traded back and forth, ideas and places and emotions are also being divvied up right now. Regardless, I canât afford to go, as I spent half of my savings moving into my own place, and the other half Iâm going to need while I find out whatâs going to happen to me.
Matthew would be rolling his eyes right now if he could hear what