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I dialed her number three times in a row and her phone went straight to voicemail each time. I left a message after the fourth call.
“Nina, it’s me. I’m starting to worry. You haven’t responded to me all day. I’m almost at the house. I guess I’ll see you in a few. Call me if you get this. I love you.”
She never called me back, and by the time the cab pulled up to the house, a feeling of dread came over me.
When I opened the door to the apartment, I yelled, “Nina?” before realizing that no one was home. I double-checked her bedroom. It was empty.
Sitting on her bed with one hand on my head and the other on the phone, I texted her again.
I am home. Where are you? You’ve got me worried sick.
I lay down on my back, tossing the phone across the bed.
Five minutes later, I looked over at her closet and noticed that the small pink suitcase she normally kept underneath her hanging clothes was gone.
Her suitcase was gone.
What the fuck?
I began to pace the room, rubbing my temples.
Think.
Think.
Think.
Then, the front door slammed shut, and I ran out to the living area to see Ryan standing there.
“Ryan, where is Nina?”
He shook his head with a smug look. “You have got some nerve, you know that?”
“Excuse me?”
“You will not find out where Nina is. You will stay the f**k away from her. Do you understand me?”
My blood was boiling, and I was ready to pounce, but I decided to play it cool until I could find out where she was. That was all that mattered.
“What the f**k are you talking about, Ryan?”
“I am talking about the fact that you f**ked my best friend, then took off to Boston to f**k your wife, you dirty mother fucker.”
My heart felt like it was going to leap out of my chest.
No.
This could not be happening.
My hands began to shake, and I had to clench my fists to keep from throwing a punch.
My voice was low as I spoke through gritted teeth, resisting the urge to charge at him. “What…did you…tell her?”
“You know, I always knew something wasn’t right with you. After having to listen to you f**k her ten times in the middle of the night, I was sure as hell going to make sure she wasn’t getting involved with someone shady. When you didn’t come home Monday night, that was it. I looked your information up in the database at work the next day and guess what came up? Your f**king marriage license! Everything made sense all of a sudden…your Boston trips, your secrecy—”
Ryan’s head slammed against the wall after I grabbed him in a choke hold. My breathing was erratic. “You don’t know anything about me. You think you figured it all out, but you don’t know shit about my life! Now, tell me where Nina is or my hands stay where they are.”
He didn’t have the strength to break free or speak, so he spit in my face.
“Tell…me…where…Nina…is,” I repeated through my teeth, tightening the hold with each word.
His head bounced back and hit the wall as I released him.
He coughed. “She’s staying with a friend, but she doesn’t want to see you.”
That stung.
I stood there glaring at Ryan. When I calmed down, I decided that considering he knew nothing about my situation, I couldn’t blame him for thinking he was protecting her. I needed to calm down and play nice to find out where she was.
“Listen, I am not going to explain everything to you until I’ve had a chance to talk to her. It’s not what you think. I am legally married, yes, but it hasn’t been a marriage in the real sense for years. It’s complicated, okay? Ivy…she’s mentally ill. She lives in a home. I rushed back to Boston because they thought she tried to kill herself.” I rubbed my temples in frustration.
Ryan just stood there speechless.
What do you have to say now, asshole?
“If this is true, I really don’t even know what to say. You should have told Nina you were married and you certainly shouldn’t have slept with her.”
I wasn’t going to waste time explaining my actions to him when the only person that deserved an explanation was Nina.
“Where is she, Ryan?”
“She’s crashing with Mrs. Ballsworthy’s daughter. She came by right after Nina found out about you. Daria had stopped in to give her a thank you basket and saw her crying. I pulled her aside and told her what happened. She insisted Nina come stay with her for at least a few days. She lives in Park Slope.”
“What’s the address?”
“I promised her I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Ryan, I like you. I do. So, I’m gonna be up front and tell you that I’m going to beat the snot out of you if you don’t tell me, and I really don’t want to have do that.”
He huffed and pulled out his phone, texting me the address.
“Thank you,” I said as I ran out the door.
***
I took a deep breath and tried to gather my thoughts before entering the brownstone. The front door was open, but you had to get buzzed in to enter the second door. I pressed the button for Unit Six.
A woman’s voice blasted through static. “Hello?”
“Hi, this is Jake. I know Nina is staying with you and doesn’t want to see me, but please, I need to talk to her. Can I come up?”
Silence.
It felt like it went on for an eternity. Then, came more static. “I’m sorry, Jake. She doesn’t want to see you. Please leave.”
I pressed the buzzer again but no response. This went on for about fifteen minutes with no luck. They were just ignoring me.
I went back outside and walked around to the back of the building to see if there were any windows. A fire escape led up to the sixth floor. If I could get up there and knock on a window, maybe they would see how serious I was and let me in. Shit, I would camp out here all night if I had to.
I began to crawl up the fire escape, unsure of whether the apartment at the top was even the right one. When I got to the sixth level, I looked in the window at a dark, empty room. Just as I was about to knock on the window and beg whoever lived there to let me in, a light came on.
The sight of her nearly knocked the wind out of me. Nina closed the door and sat down on the bed. She didn’t see me. Her beautiful long hair covered her face as she cried into her hands, her shoulders shaking up and down. Then, she looked up at the ceiling and muttered something to herself. I felt like I was about to suffocate as I watched her suffering because of me. I hated myself for causing the person I loved more than anything so much pain. It was tearing me apart. I didn’t want to scare her, but I needed to do something.
Her body jolted when I knocked on the glass. Her hand over her heart, she turned and noticed me staring through the window.
“Nina…let me in.”
She sat there just looking at me, her chest rising up and down.
“Let me in,” I repeated. “I’m not going away. You have to let me explain.”
She stayed frozen, her beautiful eyes, dark again for the first time since I met her.
“Please…I love you,” I said.
It pained me to think that she probably thought I was a horrible person who was using her.
I decided to attempt to carefully break through the window, but low and behold, it opened right up. I crawled through and closed it behind me.
It sickened me when she backed away and leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the room. I didn’t want to upset her, so I kept my distance.
“Nina…it’s not what you think.”
A tear fell from her cheek.
I decided to get right to it. This story needed to be told from the beginning, and I only had one chance to do it right. I sat down on the bed and took a deep breath, looking away from her sad face.
“I was eighteen when I met Ivy. She was like no one I had ever encountered before…so full of life and vibrant. The first time I saw her, she was dancing in the middle of a torrential rainstorm. I walked up to her and made small talk. We made plans for later that night. She was a guitarist, played some small gigs and I went to see her perform in a coffee house. I just thought she was really cool. I guess it was infatuation. We became inseparable and started dating. About six months later, we got a little drunk one night, and she decided that it would be a brilliant idea to hop the next flight to Vegas and get married. What did I know? I was an impulsive teenager with a hot girlfriend and figured it would make a really cool story someday to say I got married by Elvis. I thought I knew what love was then. I thought I loved her enough to spend the rest of my life with her.”
I looked over at Nina to gauge her reaction, and she was looking down at the ground.
“That Vegas trip was just about my last good memory…until I met you. Anyway, we moved in together after that. My family was pissed at me for eloping. My sister didn’t talk to me for weeks. They didn’t like her and thought she was a bad influence. But I was still in the honeymoon phase and didn’t care what anyone thought. About six months later, our relationship began to change. She started calling in sick a lot to work and stopped going to her classes. We were fighting all the time about her behavior. I started to realize that getting married was a really big mistake. I’d get home from work, and she’d accuse me of having affairs all day. Then, the next day, she would tell me she was hearing voices and that they were telling her I was trying to kill her and that she’d better kill herself before I got to her. At first, I thought it was just stress, because she had recently lost her mother to a heart attack. She had no other family, except me. Every day, though, it was something different. The erratic behavior went on for months. One day, she showed up at my job and in front of my co-workers, screamed about how I was trying to poison her. That was when I took her to the hospital for the first time. By the time we left, she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.”
I turned to look at Nina, who was now looking back at me.
“A lot of people can live very normal lives with it, because it can be managed with medication. We tried every medication out there, Nina. Nothing worked. They call her condition ‘treatment-resistant’ now. She was in and out of hospitals, and I just couldn’t take care of her anymore. I was worried she’d kill herself while I was at work. So, about a year after she got the diagnosis, I reached my breaking point and put her in a group home. Shortly after that, I got a job offer I couldn’t refuse in New York with the kind of benefits I needed to help take care of her. She made me promise I would visit her every weekend. That was four years ago, and I’ve kept that promise.”
Nina let out a deep breath. I stopped talking for a few seconds to let her process what I had told her so far. She finally whispered, “Jake…I—”
“Please…don’t say anything yet. I need to finish this.”
She nodded.
“I was scared shitless those first couple of years, but over time, it just became my normal. The way I saw it, I had made my bed, and I had to lie in it. I convinced myself that I could handle it. I was just a 20-year-old. Twenty f**king years old and I was taking care of my mentally ill wife. After those first two years, our relationship changed. It became less like husband and wife and more like brother and sister. We haven’t been intimate since she moved to the group home over four years ago. Even in the months before that, it was almost non-existent, and when it happened, it didn’t even feel right anymore. I was celibate for a long time. Then, a couple of years ago, I started seeking out women I knew I could use as an escape with no strings. I had needs, and I was so f**king lonely.”
“Women like Desiree,” she whispered.
I nodded.
“I had accepted that fate. My life was all planned out, and that was it. I’d stay legally married to Ivy so she could have my benefits and so I could look out for her, and the rest of my life would be separate. I was basically dead inside…until you.”
She turned to me. “What happened the other night…when you had to go to Boston?”
“They thought she tried to kill herself. They found her on the roof. No one knows what really happened.”
Nina closed her eyes as if my words hurt. “So, you were going to tell me all of this the night we—”
“Yes. Yes, Nina. I was going to tell you everything and hope that by some miracle, you’d still want to be with me.”
She walked over and sat next to me on the bed. I inhaled her vanilla scent. I wanted to hold her so badly and bury my nose in her hair but held back, unsure of where things stood. She reached for my hand and squeezed it and my body relaxed. We just sat like that for minutes. My heart was breaking with each second that passed. The silence was killing me. “Nina, talk to me,” I finally said, my voice hoarse.
“I don’t know what to say, Jake. I am so confused right now. I spent the past few hours filled with hate toward you. I thought you were sneaking around on your wife with me. I never wanted to see you again. And now…I don’t know what to feel. This was a lot to take in.”
I shook my head in understanding, but inside, I was shitting a brick. I don’t know what other kind of reaction I expected.
What I wanted to say was, “you said you’d never leave me.” What I actually said was, “I know this is a shock and can only imagine how you feel. You need to know how much I love you and how you’ve changed my life.”
Her eyes were watering again. “Are you going to stay married to her?”
“I never planned to divorce her because I never planned to fall in love with someone. I don’t know what would happen to her if we weren’t legally married, what rights I’d have when it came to her care. I still have to do a lot of research before I cut those ties legally. I would never be able to abandon her, Nina. She’s always going to be a part of my life. But if divorcing her is a condition of being with you, then I am telling you right here and now that I will do it.”