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It was hard to be lonely when you were surrounded by the endless pull of three living, breathing, vibrant kids. Then again, it was hard not to be lonely under those conditions.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them,’” he said as if reciting a quote. It only took me a second to realize that a quote was exactly right. “‘The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’”
“It’s like plugging into a different reality—one where the bullshit just falls away. You eat and you struggle. You make it through each moment, hoping it won’t be your last. And when you finally lie down for the night, you turn to the person next to you and say what’s in your heart. You don’t have the energy for anything else.”
Juggling the lives of three children, each one of them headstrong and brilliant, took every scrap of energy I had. I made it through each moment, hoping I wasn’t making their lives worse, and when I finally lay down for the night, I turned to…what, exactly? An empty bed? A flattened pillow? A realization that with everything my heart longed to say, there wasn’t a sole living person who wanted to hear it?
Books were always trying to teach us that the power of love could overcome any hardship and that money didn’t buy happiness. In many ways, I believed those things to be true—I really did. But crossing that line was a lot to ask of someone. Especially someone you loved.
my only safety net—a wispy, unreliable thing with more holes than support. Somewhere in there was another metaphor about how one person couldn’t be a safety net alone, how they’d eventually get spread so thin that they were reduced to a bundle of loosely tied threads,
He was dramatic. He always had been. For as long as he could remember, he’d always reacted to situations in the worst possible way. He laughed when he should have smiled, cried when he should have sucked it up, curled into a ball when what the situation needed was a stiff upper lip.
that he was a man who felt things too much, too quickly; that every day was a struggle to find the balance between what the world expected of him and what his heart demanded of himself.
There was no combination of letters in any language that could match the way it felt to have Catherine’s body next to him—her heart beating against his, her mouth open to let him in, her very spirit escaping and wrapping around his insides until he could no longer tell where one of them ended and the other began. He could read every book in existence and never come even close to that.
“I was ground down the day I was born. The most I can hope for is to return to the earth exactly as I came into it.”
He’d forgotten how it felt. To hold a book in your hands and know that everything would turn out okay in the end, to lose yourself in someone else’s story… That was a joy he hadn’t allowed himself to indulge in for a very long time.
You suffered and you strove. And even though it hurt, you survived.
In many ways, books were more alive than most of the people he knew. They were living, breathing entities that changed each time you picked them up. When he was a young man, every book had been an opportunity to see the world from a place of safety and comfort, to travel to exotic destinations he’d been unable to afford and too shy to explore on his own. As a middle-aged man, he’d found books to be less about hope and more about finding the discrepancies between what fiction had promised and reality delivered. And as an old man…well. He wasn’t sure about that part yet. These days, he was
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“It’s real life, Jasper. That’s all. Not some dark horror story I get to read as a way to avoid my humdrum existence, and not some sweet tale of redemption you can pretend waits for you in the future. It’s just two people who made a mess and now have to deal with the consequences.”
“I only hit that man because I couldn’t hit the thing I was really mad at,” Jasper told me, and it made so much sense that even Zach nodded along. “What were you mad at?” I asked. “Life,” he said. “My mother. My brothers and sisters. All my stupid mistakes and useless dreams. Everything I didn’t have and all the things I never would. But mostly I was mad at myself. I’ve been mad at myself for a very long time.”
He likes knowing how close he is to the things that make life brighter, and he likes being a few steps away from happiness. He also likes not ever actually getting there. It’s okay, because I understand. I understand a lot more than anyone thinks. Because what happens if you reach the thing and you still aren’t happy? What happens if you try to do better, but no matter how much of yourself you put in, you’ll never be what the teachers and bosses and people in the grocery store want?
“Think about it—we live in a glorious time of human existence. If I pull out my phone, I can instantly access every piece of documented history. We’ve passed no fewer than fifteen different restaurants since we got on this road, and we can pay for anything we want to eat with a small piece of plastic we carry in our pockets. And that’s not even counting the fact that we’re sitting comfortably inside a hunk of metal designed to fly over roads using the decayed remains of marine plants and animals that lived millions of years ago.
“Everyone’s heart breaks at least once in a lifetime,” she said, determined, as ever, to go her own way. “It’s as inevitable as falling in love. The real challenge is deciding what you plan to do about it.”
“I know why you abandoned your kids,” Jasper continued. “I know how you did it, too. You turned yourself around in all kinds of circles, rationalizing to yourself that you were only doing what was best for everyone. They’d be better off without you. They needed more than you could give. A clean break would be the kindest gift you could offer. It would hurt, obviously, but they had their whole lives ahead of them. They’d get over you and move on, and so easily that you felt pretty sure you’d suffer more than they did in the end.”
“Only that’s not how it works, is it?” Jasper asked. His voice had grown so quiet by this time that he held the entire room spellbound. “You don’t get to decide how other people feel. The things you do matter. The way you hurt these children matters. Maybe you genuinely thought you were taking the only path available to you, but the truth is that you took the path you wanted. And you didn’t give a single, solitary damn what would happen when your kids tried to run after you only to find that you’d barred the way for any of them to follow.”
“She can pretend that she’s a grown woman now, with a family and responsibilities, but I know the truth. I always have. She’s a beautiful, entitled, cruel whirlwind of a girl, and I love her so much that nothing she says or does will ever change that. Not even death or, worse, sixty years of silence.”
What’s the point of living if all you’re going to do is make everyone around you miserable? What are we put on this earth for if not to make life better for those we leave behind?’”
That was when I snapped. I wish I could say that I went off on her in a full blaze of glory, spouting venom like Jasper Holmes at his angriest, letting loose all the stress and anxiety of the past four years—or even that I eloquently reduced her to rubble with a literary quote. Instead, I severed any remaining ties in my heart and let myself feel the one emotion she genuinely deserved: my pity.
It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn,’”
“You know, the thing I’ve always loved most about books is how they make it possible to live a thousand different lives,” she said, speaking as though my heart wasn’t leaking out all over my face and dripping onto her expensive purse. “Things in this world rarely go according to plan, and we often find ourselves on roads and in cities we never planned to visit, let alone stay in forever. I take comfort from knowing that I can always pick up a book—a new one, if I want to travel someplace unique; an old one, if I find myself in need of a friend—and make everything feel right again.”
“The world isn’t what it used to be, Chloe.” She gave a short laugh. “Well, that’s not true. It’s the same relentless, beautiful, soul-crushing place it’s always been. But it’s bigger now. More connected. If you don’t like where you are, you don’t have to pack up your whole family and abandon everything you know and love. All you have to do is grab a different story from the shelf.”
Forget the past,’” she quoted. “‘Let the dead bury the dead. Things are working out fine, and that’s the only thing you have to remember.’”
One of my greatest skills in this world—some might say it was my only skill—was how good I was at being inoffensive. The trick was to look bland, act blander, and voice no opinions whatsoever. The looking bland part I had down pat, my frizzy brown hair and lightly freckled skin blending into the background so easily that I sometimes felt like a potted ficus. The acting part was easy, too. I could go for days at a time without opening my mouth to say anything but “Yes, of course” and “No, you’re right,” and no one seemed to think there was anything odd about it. The opinions part was harder,
