Loved - A Novel (25 page)

              I didn’t know if it was enough, and I didn’t know if I could stay away from Zane. I was plagued by guilt. Honestly, I knew it was over with Ben. He had no interest in fixing our relationship and I was basically having an affair.

              Zane was over every night. Usually, he came to my window to see what I was doing. It was apparent that Ben was not making time for me since I was always home doing nothing. Zane and I would even kiss at the door when he left and I wondered if Ben would show up and catch us. Maybe I wanted him to—actually not maybe. Yes, I wanted him to. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I wanted him to pay more attention to me like Zane was.

But I tended not to date men who ever showed up for me.

              Finally, I let Zane in. That’s when I knew it was really over with Ben. Even if I preferred to be with Ben, I knew that it wasn’t working so I was attempting to protect myself by making other plans. It didn’t feel like I was being protected though. It felt like I was making a mess.

              I needed to get away so I went and stayed at a friend’s house just outside of town. We smoked pot on the patio and I kept my cell phone off the whole weekend. I smoked very rarely and I’d never been that high. I hung out on the outdoor lounge for hours without moving, hovering somewhere above myself in the haze.

              On Sunday, I went back to Nashville and straight to Ben’s place in my white linen dress. I was still in a bit of a daze and much tanner from baking in the sun. I knew we had to talk about things but I had no idea what I was going to say.  Before I could say anything at all, Ben broke up with me. I was hurt but not devastated. Maybe I was even a little relieved. I was more worried about losing my friend than anything else—as was he—but my heart weighed heavy in my chest. I’d loved him for a year. He saved me from myself when I was so broken, and now, after barely giving it a real shot, it was over. I slept on Sophie’s couch that night, afraid that the anxiety would return.

              I avoided Ben and kept seeing Zane. I needed space to grieve if there was going to be any hope of keeping a friendship with Ben. Then, Ben found out about Zane. He called me drunk in the middle of the night to announce that he knew, and then he came over to talk about it. He wasn’t angry, which was precisely the problem, but he was hurt and he had lost his trust in me. I understood and I deserved that.

              I told him that I needed some time to get over him.  Despite my disrespectful actions, I really cared about him. I needed to be away from him until I was ready to be his friend again. Just his friend; I still believed that was possible.

              One day I got a text from Zane that he had spent the previous night in the hospital. He’d been having headaches lately that were becoming increasingly worse. It got so bad that Phil, his roommate, had taken him to the ER. They were waiting on test results but Zane said the doctors thought he had a brain tumor. I went to see him on my lunch break, then again after work, and again the next night. Phil was asleep on the cot in Zane’s tiny room. I
lay
on the bed next to Zane, his head in the nook of my shoulder, and I played with his long curly hair. He was wearing the silver bracelet that I’d brought him. 

It was a brain tumor, the doctors told him, and he made plans to go home to England to have his surgery. He was released from the hospital the next day, Friday, and would be leaving on Monday for England. Friday night, I went over to Phil and Zane’s for dinner and then Zane and I watched a movie and fell asleep on his bed—his head in my lap.

              I took Saturday off work to help Zane run errands; most of the errands were for him to tie up a few things but one stop was for me. I was checking out storage units. The condo that I had bought when I was with Chad was almost complete, and I didn’t know if I was moving into it or into another apartment of my own. I did know that I was ready to live alone. Metamorphosis was becoming a habit for me.  When my heart was broken, I changed everything about myself and my scenery in order to mend it.

After our errands, Zane and I watched movies all afternoon and dozed off for a little while. I was somewhere between asleep and awake when the balloon that he brought home from the hospital caught my eye as it danced in the draft from the fan and I watched it for a minute. As sleep began to overtake me, my half-open eyes caught a glimpse of a woman in his mirror.

I think it was an angel.

The butterfly in reverse here is me.

Counting Crows

             
August, 2007.

              The first week that Zane was gone I stayed in his room a few nights.  There I was surrounded by his scent and his spirit. I loved that the DVDs were alphabetized and it included both Disney titles and live rock concerts. I loved the three pairs of cowboy boots that lined up in his closet.

              I knew better than to romanticize our relationship.  Knowing myself, my imagination could easily take us from being close friends to being soul mates torn apart by a big ocean and a little tumor—all in a matter of days. I worked hard to remember what was real; we were friends. However, I couldn’t help but think about the similarities between Chase and Zane. Eyeliner, velvet, claiming an unconcern for the opinions of others and a battle with a sort of darkness that no one else could see. Even his room: Zane’s mattress was on the bare floor like in the apartment that I shared with Chase in my imaginations. He had essentially no furniture; a few books, DVDs,
guitar, loud music. 

Somehow, I always end up in these rooms alone.

             
Remember
, I told myself,
he’s not the guy in your dreams. He is a real person with needs and faults and you can love him, but you’re not right for each other.

             
Even though I didn’t know what was right for me, I knew it wasn’t him.

              The condo that I’d bought, my would-have-been “home” with Chad, was almost completed and I couldn’t afford to live there. I talked with four mortgage brokers who all said that my credit was good but that I didn’t make enough to get approved for the loan on my own.  I envisioned a man-behind-the-curtain scene at the bank and a loud voice saying that, “She might be responsible but she’s gone overboard with the credit cards and she makes squat!” The little man, on the other hand, in his striped button down shirt sat at a wooden desk and stared at all of my financial failures in one neat little folder.

              I should have been living in that condo, cozying up on the couch with my husband, rather than in this mess alone.

              Damn Chad.

Damn him, damn him, damn him!

September, 2007.

              In September I went home to Westville and stopped by Chase’s house to see his mom. I sat on the couch and talked with her and cried. The last time that I’d been there, I wouldn’t go into his room. I hadn’t been ready, but this time I was. 

“Spend as much time in there as you need, Kit, sweetheart,” she said. “And just let me know if there is anything you’d like to have.” 

I looked for his notes from me but couldn’t find them.  He wouldn’t have gotten rid of them, would he? I did find some pictures of us that I didn’t have so I took them. I looked for his
Stone Temple Pilots
t-shirt, too, but didn’t find it.

              When I came back out, his mom handed me a small gray box that said “Shine” on the lid like the tattoo on the back of my neck that I’d gotten for him that August, on the anniversary of his death. As I was lifting the lid, I realized what I was about to see—a small packet of his ashes.

              She was giving me part of Chase, an actual part of him. I was unable to articulate how much that meant to me, but I hoped my tears showed it.

             
November, 2007.

              I sold the condo and was free from the future Chad and I had planned, and I even got to keep the profit. I patted myself on the back for being smart enough to put only my name on the contract. Now I could decide for myself where I wanted to live, and I was ready to have my own place. Sure, it was more expensive to live without a roommate, but I needed my own space. I needed a place that I wouldn’t want to run away from, somewhere to spread my wings and to take care of myself. The property manager of a complex in the neighborhood where Kellie and Sophie lived showed me the most beautiful apartment that I’d ever seen. 

Apartment Twelve. 

I loved it more than any fancy new condo.

              It had three spacious rooms. The kitchen was large enough for a little cafe table and chairs, and I had shining granite countertops and warm blush-colored tile. The huge living room and bedroom floors were hardwood and each room had an old painted radiator. Crown molding ran throughout the place and there were windows on every wall.  Never before had I let so much light into my life. I used to cover my windows with heavy curtains—never drawn. Now I danced in the sunlight on my hardwood floors.

              I put the farmhouse dining table with four of its six curved cream-colored Belini chairs at the end of the living room close to the kitchen. I painted a yard sale table light pink and put it with the other two chairs in the corner of the kitchen under the big pink and green painting that read, “I gave her roses and she blames me for the thorns.”

              Then, there was the bedroom. Oh, the bedroom! I found a wooden nightstand at an antique mall and replaced the knob on the drawer with a heavy round black and white striped treasure. The bottom of it held three years worth of
Vogue
Magazines. It sat atop a cream shag rug that my bare feet would hit first thing every morning. When I could afford it, I bought the dreamiest bedding. Gray and tufted with pillow shams to match.

This is my bed
, I thought. 
No one else belongs. There’s no room here to miss anyone.
I stopped sleeping on the right side and slept smack dab in the middle, and I slept like a baby.

              I turned twenty-five the week after I moved in. I always knew that I would not be the girl having the quarter life crisis. That had come to pass, and even the romantic crises were at bay for now.

              And it wasn’t just the apartment. I opened the windows to my life and let the sun shine in. My career, my social life, my spiritual life and my physical health all flourished despite the lack of activity in my love life, which used to be the center of all things.  I was loving myself and, after all, that really should be enough.

              My career grew slowly and steadily. I took an administrative job in marketing, which helped me to develop a steady daily routine and gave me more funds to build my styling business. I was booking more gigs and styling artists on music video shoots and models on fashion photo shoots and I worked backstage at the CMT Awards. I began to build a solid multi-media portfolio for myself.

              I had still been attending the wonderful, young and active church that I found with Lacey when I moved back from L.A., but aside from sitting on a folding chair in the downtown music venue where we met each Sunday morning, I had hardly been a member of the church community.  Now, I began to make friends at church and grow in my own faith. I used to compartmentalize God. Although I still struggled with this, knowing that I needed to let God into the darkest and scariest corners of my heart, but I was getting better and better at it and I was led by the example of my church family.

              I lived by that old Girl Scout song, “make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.” Since our days at Longshots, Kellie, Sophie and I had developed a close, intimate friendship. Three’s company and we were a perfect support system for each other through what was happening in each of our lives. I was more different from each of them than any other close friend that I’d had, and sometimes it felt like it was hard for them to understand me; regardless, they unfailingly supported everything that I did.

              Kellie and her boyfriend who had been the drummer for the Longshot’s band broke up after five years of dating.  He had been Kellie’s first and only boyfriend, and she was experimenting now with dating casually and being on her own. As an assistant to a booking agent at a major talent company, she began to discover that she had the mind of an agent. She started working with new artists and producers, helping them to develop their talents and ideas in the hopes that they would soon be her own clients.

              Sophie and one of the guitarists for the band began dating much in the same way that you notice a house being built on your drive to work—slowly, then suddenly. They fell into a beautiful, respectful and mad love and began to plan a wedding.

New friends were coming into my life from many different places. Aside from my church friends, there was a guy from my partying and dancing days. We both had cut back on the partying and found that we had much else in common too, particularly our taste in men.
A new girlfriend worked for the salon where I had been getting my hair done. She turned me back to my favorite shade of blonde. She was younger and livelier than me, always so enthusiastic about what I had to tell her or what was new in her own life. She was completely unafraid of what anyone thought of her, and that’s probably because one would have had to search very, very hard to find anything bad to say about her.