Hoops Holiday (Hoops 2.50)

I shrug and shiver, pulling the sheet tighter around me. “I would say he wasn’t trying hard enough. He would say I didn’t understand. We’d . . . fight. We stopped . . .”

My voice dies in the dark. I dip my head to hide my face, ashamed to hear my part in this tragedy spoken aloud.

“You stopped what, Ave?” Deck probes gently, kissing my forehead and encouraging me to go on. “You can tell me.”

“We stopped . . .” I glance up at him through a dampened veil of eyelashes. “We stopped making love. We were like roommates, miserable more often than not, but determined to keep trying. I loved him. I did, but I’m not sure for the last year or so that I was in love with him.”

My harsh laugh puffs across our lips, just inches apart.

“Hell, he probably wasn’t in love with me either there at the end,” I say. “He went on a business trip and he cheated.”

Deck’s hard body goes still, and his thumb caresses under my chin, urging my eyes up to meet his.

“He was a fool,” Deck says. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but anyone who isn’t satisfied with you is a fool.”

“No, I was a shrew.” I wince, replaying some of our arguments. “We both wanted it to work so badly. We loved who we were in the beginning, but we weren’t those people anymore. At least not to each other.”

I always knew Will had . . . spells. Seasons when he would withdraw because life felt too hard, and nothing, not even our closeness, could pull him out. I didn’t realize how bad it was until last year, and even then, I never imagined he’d harm himself. He stopped going to work. Stopped eating and showering regularly. Stopped making love to me. Stopped everything that made him happy. Stopped everything that made him . . . Will. He stopped everything that made us . . . us, and it broke my heart. Long before anonymous out-of-town hook up ho, my heart had been broken in minutes and hours and over days. We drifted out of love, into heartbreak, and settled into a terrible indifference. We were unrecognizable, and I didn’t know if it would have happened eventually anyway, or if his depression, the wall it erected between us, forced us to it.

“So, what happened?” Decker prompts.

“When he told me he’d cheated, I. . .” I want to cover my ears against the memory of our raised voices; of our hurtful words. “I gave him his ring back. I told him it was over and went to a hotel.”

Guilt assails me, fresh and wrenching. My heartbeat accelerates and my pulse pounds in my ears.

“That was the last time I saw him alive.” I struggle to get the words out. “How could I do that, Deck? I knew he was depressed, was struggling, but I never thought he’d do something like that.”

“Not your fault, Ave.” He squeezes my chin between his fingers firmly. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

Doing that to myself has become a habit I’m not sure I can break. Blaming myself for what happened.

“When I broke it off, he thought I would reconsider, and asked that we not tell our friends and family yet so no one knew that just days before, I’d . . .”

Abandoned him. Left him on his own. Left him to die.

The details of that night overtake what I see, what I hear, hurling me back into that cold bathroom. All the sounds and images and horrors flood my memory. I’d gone to the apartment to tell him I was sure; that we should go ahead and tell everyone it was over. Not just because of him cheating, but because we weren’t working anymore and hadn’t for a long time. As soon as I let myself into the apartment, I’d heard the music drifting from the back to the entrance.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

From now on your troubles will be out of sight

The closer I’d gotten to the bathroom, the louder the music became and the more I was sure something was wrong. The air trembled with it. Each lyric ached with the pain I’d seen in Will for years, ebbing, flowing, sometimes less, sometimes more—always there, but finally too much.

“He was in the tub,” I whisper, my eyes unfocused on the room I’m in now, but seeing that other room; seeing Will in water turned scarlet with his blood. Seeing the deep lines sliced in his wrists, perpendicular to his pain; intersecting with the misery I’d seen in his eyes for months, but been helpless to soothe. I hadn’t known his despair went that deep.

I still see that note, my name scrawled in Will’s loopy penmanship. I still see the ring I had returned to him there on the counter.

“Avery, I tried,” I say, my mouth trembling, an unsteady messenger for Will’s last words. “That’s all the note said. That he tried.”

Was it an apology? For cheating? For giving up? Was it a condemnation of me, for underestimating his despair? For pushing too hard? For wanting too much? Always more from him, or for him? The questions make well-worn laps in my mind, round and round, dizzying me with the finality of Will’s one-sided farewell.

The song. The tub. The blood. The ring. The note.

Second after painful second, I manage to drag myself out, like I’ve had to do so many times since that night. I focus on Decker, pleading for him to understand, or maybe to help me understand.

“Sometimes I’d say he wasn’t trying because that’s all I know how to do,” I say. “I’ve spent my whole life trying. Achieving. Making things happen for myself, and on some level, I didn’t understand that it wasn’t that easy for him. That it wasn’t about trying. It was deeper than that. For him it was harder than that. Maybe he was trying until he just couldn’t try anymore. And I saw that too late, Deck, and now he’s gone.”