Olive Juice

It was for Alice, after all.

Eleven months later she was gone.

And two weeks after that, he was holding the damn jeans in the middle of the laundry room in the middle of the night, and right before the dam burst, right before he struggled to breathe as he made the most broken of noises, he had the time to think, oh sweetheart, where are you?

And then he split right down the middle.

Phillip found him the next morning, sleeping fitfully, face still wet, lying on the laundry room floor, clutching a pair of jeans in his hands.

The second time had been the day he’d said those terrible things to Phillip, shredding what they had left into the tiniest of pieces. He didn’t like to think about that day.

And here, now, he cried. For the third time since he’d received a phone call from a kid named Digger at 3:37 on a spring afternoon in March of 2012, David cried.

But this was different than it’d been before.

He’d been alone then.

Now?

Now he broke in the arms of his husband who he hadn’t seen in almost eight months before this late night. His husband, who David had been convinced would have him served with divorce paperwork any day now. His husband, who David had missed almost as much as he’d missed their daughter. There had been nights when, instead of thinking, What is Alice doing right now? he’d thought instead, What is Phillip doing right now? He’d imagined him sitting in front of the TV, legs tucked under him like he did when he wasn’t planning on moving for a while. Or he imagined him in the bookstore, smiling at his customers, glancing every now and then at the poster in the front window that asked HAVE YOU SEEN HER? with a photo of a beautiful smiling young woman underneath.

This was different.

This was different because his face was pressed against a familiar chest, and he was breaking apart, shattering like the thinnest glass, but there were arms wrapped tightly around him, and there was a voice in his ear, and for the longest time, he couldn’t make out what it was saying over the sounds of his sobs, but eventually he heard. Eventually, he heard his husband.

Phillip said, “Oh, honey. Oh, baby. Oh, David. David. David. Shh. It’s okay. It’s okay. Shh shh shh. Honey, I need you to listen to me. Baby, can you do that? David. Shh. Listen to me. She loves you. Wherever she is, she loves you. And I promise you, we won’t stop until we find—until we find something. Maybe it’ll be good. Maybe it won’t. But you have to know she loves you. She doesn’t blame you. You did not fail her. I didn’t fail her. We made mistakes, my love. We made mistakes because we’re human, but Alice… oh, David. Alice was the best thing we’ve ever done, and if the time we had is all we’ll get, if those nineteen years were it, then we made them the best years we could. We loved her. With everything we had. We still do. We always will. And she knew that then. And she knows it now. Just like she knew that all she had to do was turn those eyes on us and she’d get whatever she wanted. She was ours, David. She is ours. I’m sorry for what I said earlier. I’m sorry for saying she was gone. I—I want to believe. I want to believe that one day, she’ll walk in that door and

say she was sorry. She was sorry, but that she’d just gotten a little lost, but now she was home, now she was home and she w-wasn’t g-g-going to l-l-leave us again—”

David kissed Phillip, again and again, both of them choking on their tears.

They breathed.

They ached.

They lived.

And there were these little deaths, okay? These little deaths that ripped through them, tearing open festering and rotten wounds, exposing them open to the air around them. They bled as they held on to each other, bled profusely, waiting for the storm to pass.

It took its time.

But eventually, like all things, it did.

The kisses were softer, less frantic.

The tears lessened.

They hurt, a raw, sensitive electric shock that felt like exposed nerves.

And maybe it would never go away. Maybe there would always be this hole inside of them. The not knowing. The mystery. The secret.

But.

They lay side by side, hands clasped between the two of them, neither wanting to let the other go.

Phillip said, “Do you know why? Why I wanted to see you?”

David thought he did. But he asked, “Why?”