This Close To Okay

by Leesa Cross-Smith

She didn’t want the man on the bridge to know she was a therapist with a rich big-shot brother and a calming office just yet, because that would separate them. She wanted him to think and know she was like him; they were the same. She had her share of want-to-jump days like everyone else, just had never made it over the railing before.

Shattered energy seemed to pulse from him like sonar. Tight blips of loneliness. Tallie translated the echolocation easily. She was lonesome and blipping, too.

She was on the safe side of the railing; he was on the suicide side. She doubted he would be able to hear the music. It was a loud world. She was only a bit surprised no one else stopped, no one else pulled to the side and said hey. Everyone always thought everyone else would take care of things.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said with enough breathtaking sadness to stop clocks. “It matters. You matter. Your life matters. It does,” she said and waited for a response. When she didn’t get one, she continued, “Um…we’re almost there. The coffee shop is just up the road. You may know that. Are you from around here? I’m kind of winging this, but I’m trusting God right now.” “What if there’s no God?” he asked, looking out his window, the raindrops slicking down in a beaded curtain. Then I don’t know. That’s why I have to believe there is, she thought.

Her mother and brother often insisted on saying what didn’t need to be said. Hurtful things. It was one of the reasons Tallie had become a therapist—to help people be kinder to themselves and others. To make the world a safer, sweeter place. Once when Tallie was ten and playing in her room by herself, content and humming, her mother had told her she was a lonely little girl. She’d never forgotten it.

obsessing over those things was something that made her feel crazy. Crazier. When it got going, it was a loop she kept looping, a hoop she kept swirling around and around, never stopping.

She knew making suicide harder for people who were considering it was sometimes the difference between life and death. She’d read about the suicide rate plummeting in Great Britain after something as simple as swapping the coal gas stoves for natural gas, because too often, suicide came down to a matter of convenience. She was pleased that making so much fucking noise had made a difference.

after my divorce, I was so sad I didn’t know what to do. My world was smashed, and it felt like I was blurred out, too. Couldn’t see straight.”

My dear bright Christine, my love and life. My world went dark when you left. You are my whole heart. I am broken and empty without you. What else is left for me to do? I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.

Brenna, my sunshine. It’s dark now.

Emmett could go to the bridge after dinner. He’d once wondered if the aching would ever stop and it hadn’t, so wasn’t the bridge his last hope? His only hope? Death and hope wrestled, tangled tight. Was there anything left but the bridge?

She asked a lot of questions and smiled at him like he hadn’t just been standing on a bridge wanting to jump, wanting to quiet the noise, wanting it all to end somehow. But the bridge would be there waiting for him, its arms outstretched. He didn’t need to make an appointment. He’d chosen today for a specific reason, but later would work, too, or tomorrow. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He wanted it to. He wanted everything to matter, but nothing did. Grief had swung open a door in his heart he hadn’t known was there, and it’d slammed closed behind him. He’d been on the other side for three years. Too long. Locked away, unable to escape, tackled and held down by the darkness that wouldn’t let him go. Jumping from the bridge meant a chance to soar before the free fall.

So much darkness, Tallie couldn’t possibly understand, even if he laid it out for her. And he didn’t. Wouldn’t.

She drank some wine, put the glass down. Picked it up again and finished it, wiping her bottom lip with her thumb. “Easy, tiger,” he said. “Ha! Why do men think women can’t hold their alcohol? It’s like you guys depend on us being weak and vulnerable even when we’re not. You’re drinking tonight, but I can’t?” “I’m sorry. I was only kidding. Really. I didn’t mean it like that. You don’t seem vulnerable. Maybe you should behave more like it, but you don’t,” he said. “Wait…I should?” “Hell, yeah. You invite a stranger…a man to your house? A suicidal stranger. I know you can’t stop thinking about that part. Look at me. I’m not all there up here, apparently,” he said, pointing to his head. “I could be anyone.” “And so could I.” “Yeah, but it’s different and you know it.”

His feelings shuffled like a deck of cards—diamonds of embarrassment, overreacting clubs, stubbornness in spades, the ace of guilt. And his heart, their hearts, still beating. Somehow. But hope. Hope was the real joker. Had he confused exhaustion for hopelessness? Maybe they felt exactly the same in the cold rain, darkness creeping.

Maybe you need a couple days to feel back to your old self?” Emmett swallowed and took his time. “I don’t ever want to feel back to my old self.”

What did it feel like to have a happy brain? He couldn’t fully remember, although there was a flick of it somewhere inside him. But it was too small, too far away.

Emmett let pencil skirt hang out to dry in his brain momentarily, having absolutely no clue what those words meant put together like that. He was baffled and impressed by all the secret things women knew about the world.

Tallie doing something small like that made him feel loved. The costumes, the food—someone else was taking control, even about tiny decisions. For so long with Christine he had to make every decision, check every lock, pay every bill, make every breakfast, every lunch and dinner. All of it had wrung him out, but he didn’t have to worry about that anymore. Christine: a bucket filled to the top that he’d been asked to carry through a war zone, over fiery coals, in a hot air balloon, on a shaky roller coaster. Their relationship, doomed from the start. She spilled out and over, and there was nothing he could do about it. The inevitability of it had borne down and crushed him. But now, Christine was gone, and none of that mattered. He missed her. And the mere pinch of any kind of forgiveness or mercy flooded his heart with watery light.

All the big and little things. The stupid, annoying things. The important things. Now she had to do them all alone.

She hadn’t gone wild yet, but she’d been feeling the pinball lever of it pulled out tight, ready for release after years of ignoring her own feelings and listening to everyone else’s instead. She could be wild! She could do something! Anything could happen!

Was he seriously this sexy and didn’t know it? Knew but didn’t care? He had plenty on his mind. He could lean there, smoke sexily, and it wouldn’t matter to anyone in the world. He was depressed, and depression wasn’t sexy. She saw so much of it every day that she didn’t have a romanticized idea of it. People died, people were miserable, people gave up. Forgot how important and loved they were. Depression was a vacuum that sucked out everything—leaving nothing behind except the burdening weight of nothingness.

Tallie had been frustrated with herself, half wishing she were the kind of person who wanted him and Odette to die and disappear forever. Or at least the kind of person who could hope for the possible future schadenfreude of Joel eventually cheating on Odette, or their marriage falling apart. But none of that would change what had happened, and she knew the toxicity levels of hating Odette would poison her and her only.

Being a therapist allowed Tallie to dig into the common sense so easily clouded by mental illness, depression, obsessiveness, anxiety. She encouraged clients struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder to take time-stamped photos of their turned-off ovens and locked doors so they could revisit them during the day. She suggested to one OCD client who worried about leaving her coffeemaker on every morning to unplug the coffee machine or whatever small appliance worried her and take it with her to work. That way she knew for certain it wasn’t left on at home, ripe for fire starting. So much of therapy was practicality and giving people a much-needed pass to relax when they needed to or be weird when they needed to. To free their minds from doing what they felt like they should be doing if it always went against what they wanted to do. To ask questions like why when the client had never considered it.

The news was so fucking depressing, and that was part of the reason he wanted to jump. How did anyone survive anything? Anxiety began itching at his neck, and his body ached with grief, a fact he’d gotten used to after years of living with it. “Grief hurts…physically,” his dad had warned him.

“You’re probably always taking care of other people. I say probably because I don’t want to come off like a know-it-all, mansplaining your own life to you, but I know it’s true. Look at what you did for me. You didn’t have to do that. So let me do something for you,”

“How many dates until you knew Joel was the one?” Emmett asked after listening. “I don’t know…maybe two months’ worth? I was seeing someone else off and on for a bit, but Joel was handsome, flirty, funny. Really sexy and aggressively confident, and he wore suits…a lot,” Tallie said. “He’s brainy and intrepid, too.” “Wow…intrepid,” Emmett teased in a deeper voice. “I know. But he is! Trust me, I’d never use that word to describe anyone else but Joel.” “Well, it’s a great word.” “Agreed.” Tallie paused. “And yeah, so…I’d had serious boyfriends, but being with Joel made me feel like I’d won something in a way I can’t explain. Like in choosing between him and the other man I was seeing…Joel made me feel like it had to be him. How could it not be him? He was Joel! He’d somehow convinced me he was the only man in the world.” “And now?” “Now I know better,”

Talking about Christine’s death was a surefire way to get him thinking about his own. Grief was so tedious, and his own death was the only escape from it. He told Tallie some truth and let it out—even if only a little—to avoid detonation. The only other option was to move forward with his original plan to make it all stop.

men need to get better at taking care of the women they claim to love so much.

Did looking forward to something feel like this? Living had felt so much like dying that he could hardly remember. Did it feel like concertina wire unraveling? Like his heart was a cracked, tipped cup, running over?

“Do you feel like being on the bridge was a proportionate response to whatever it was that sent you there?” She knew her question probably sounded too much like a question a therapist would ask, so she turned the TV volume down and added, “There’s no right answer, by the way. I’m just curious.” “I do,” he said easily. “How else do you deal with stress in your life? How did you handle your wife’s death when it happened?” “I haven’t properly handled her death yet, really. I can’t. I try, I guess…but none of it makes sense. She was there and now she’s just gone? Everything gets too slippery. My brain can’t…hold it. It feels both final and eternal at the same time. I can’t process it so I just let it…sit there…dark.”

He was paralyzed on that edge in the rain, like that edge was the bridge. He’d jump. It was time to jump. He’d fought and fought and fought to no avail. A couple of signs weren’t enough to fix him. Maybe they were just coincidences anyway. Remember, nothing matters. Fuck it—

“I was scared,” she admitted. Relieved. She’d enjoyed his company so much; she felt exposed by how hurt she’d be if he left without warning. Like her heart would turn to gray ash and blow away.

Even when he did dumb shit, his tender conscience was a crutch. It’d plagued him his whole life. He took on other people’s emotions, absorbed them without wanting to, like an abandoned sponge.

There were wide cracks in his sanity, something he’d been so sure of before. After had devoured before, leaving him crumpled. “Some big things I miss about him are…how funny he is and honestly, his body…ugh, I was just so physically attracted to him it almost made me sick. And…I also miss sharing sadness. Now, lucky me, I get it all to myself,” Tallie said. “We spent a lot of time alone together. Entire weekends in this house, only us. I guess that’s why I find myself thinking…was I making all that up? Where the hell did it go?”

“What’s something big you miss about Christine?” she asked, pulling her hair over her shoulder. “Her messy aliveness. She really went for it, y’know? So full of life and couldn’t get enough of even the things she hated. She really rocket-burned out instead of simply fading away,” he said, the answer breaking through quickly, requiring almost no brain energy from him at all. “That’s beautiful. Tragic and beautiful.” “Well, yeah…that’s a perfect way of describing her.”

“Does it bother you, talking about God? About religion?” “Not really,” he said. “So yesterday you said, ‘What if there’s no God’…Is that what you believe?” “I think God is there, but indifferent.” “Feels too cruel to me. Him being there, but not caring. I can’t believe in that kind of God,” she said. “But when things get dark and hopeless…that’s exactly what it feels like.” Tallie took in his response. She knew healing—if and when it happened—happened in increments, the same sneaky way the days got longer and shorter. Barely noticeable at times, slow. Tallie had been treading water of her own, in that estuary where sadness spilled out into healing and joy. Believing in God came easy for her, even in her worst moments. Even when she sat there and listened to her clients tell her their secrets—the hidden, terrifying demons some people kept locked away for so long that when they finally did talk about them, it was as if a cloud of black death wanted to swallow them whole. She’d seen people come out at the other end of that darkness. She knew God was real. When people were really messed up, most of them wanted to do better, only they didn’t know how. So they showed up in her office, simply wanting to learn more about themselves and how to live in this world. She wasn’t exactly labeled a Christian therapist, but with their permission, sometimes she liked to mention to her Christian clients that the Bible talked about all sorts of people—a lot of terrible, confused, miserable pe...

Nico texted see you tmrw, mooi, and she considered responding with there is a man i do not know on my couch and you will meet him tmrw, but i don’t know what it means. i am relearning even my own heart, but simply sent him yes pls, mooi before putting her phone in the nightstand drawer.

Tallie became a therapist instead of going to one, and she knew well enough how deeply a trained mental health professional could analyze that decision. She automatically put everyone else’s feelings and situations in front of her own because she was raised by a self-absorbed mother. Judith had a way of making Tallie feel as if her life or problems would never be as important as Judith’s own.

i had no way of knowing if i could be happy alone again! and being happy is one of those things that feels phonier and phonier the more you talk about it, but…i feel like if i squint, i can see it. and i need that hope. the hope alone is enough for me.

If people weren’t actively grieving, they’d probably never think about how hard Halloween could be on those who were. So much death. The constant reminders of where everyone ended up, never leaving them alone for even a second.

In a little town like Bloom, being a quarter black meant being not-white meant being one hundred percent black meant being an Other. A threat to white supremacy. A blight, a usurper. It was what they’d all feared. And Christine wasn’t just any white woman; she was a Bloom. That was all the evidence that particular jury needed.

Rye’s obsessive mental cataloging helped him organize a world that no longer made sense. He talked to himself about what he saw and heard and smelled and thought, as if he were a playwright like Christine, forever setting the scene. It was how he kept himself from going mad.

Once he made the decision to end his life, the obsessive observing was like burning everything in a glass jar before he said goodbye. And although suicide had crossed his mind a lot in prison, it wasn’t until he got out that he’d realized his freedom hadn’t been the answer. He still didn’t know what the answer was. Hell, he didn’t even know what the question was anymore.

“This guy was all over the news years ago. Some really awful shit. He could be a total lunatic with what he’s been through. Therapy or not, you purposely surround yourself with crazy people who suck you dry, Tallulah,” he said. “He’s not a lunatic. You think I surround myself with crazy people, which is a horrible thing to say, by the way, and I think you’re always out there looking for the next new thing. New job, new state, new wife…everything is fine until you get bored, right? Nothing can ever be good enough for you!”

Humans could feel a million different ways at the same time. It wasn’t like one emotion politely cleared out to make way for another. Most often they smudged together like daubs of paint, mixing and making new colors and feelings altogether.

After love, forgiveness is the strongest glue holding every family together.

The stabby math of grief would never add up. It would always be as if Christine and Brenna had gone on a long trip without him, never to return.