our Weeks – Episode 5 – “Sixteen”
Written by J.D.Denisson.
A sequel to the movie “This is Where I Leave You”.
Characters and back story based on the novel “This is Where I Leave You” by Jonathan Tropper.
Copyright 2016 J.D.Denisson.
Previously…
The elevator dings at my floor and slides open. Quinn is standing there dressed in an old shirt of mine and I instantly know that she’s not fine at all. She’s the opposite of fine. I step into our lounge room and the door closes behind me like a trap. Her eyes are red and she’s got dark circles below them. Her hair is usually tied back in a tail, neat and tidy, her signature look, but it’s out and a little unruly. She squeezes her eyes tight, trying to hold back her tears but that just makes it worse, they flow down her cheeks in steams.
I step up to her, take her in my arms and hold her tight, tighter than I have ever held her. Tighter than I first held her when we lost our boy. She falls apart, weeping into my shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably, shaking. I hold her, keep holding her, not saying anything for words had no meaning now, only my arms and her grief.
She stops sobbing enough to regain the power of speech, but she’s still crying. “I’m so sorry,” she weeps, “what I did to you, to us... I broke us. I hurt you so much.”
---
We talk for a long time about the lives we have lived together, about the times of great joy and the times of pain. We talk about our baby boy and what happened within her after, how the pain almost destroyed her and how she learnt to deal with it by simply living on. She talks about Wade but she doesn’t dwell on him because he’s broken her heart and she’s still hurting and through it all she’s realised she made the biggest mistake of her life and she doesn’t think she can undo it. She doesn’t tell me how things started with him or why. That would be for another time when both of us are stronger.
---
“If it’s any consolation, Man Up is in trouble. We’re ahead of them on the ratings this quarter. They went down hard right after you left.”
I laugh again, and perhaps it’s because maybe there is a little justice in this world after all. “Really?” I say.
---
“What can we do for you?” Wade asks me.
“My job,” I tell him directly. “I want to get back to work.”
---
And so I start talking. I start with facts. They’ve never failed me, but maybe they have. There is no feeling in facts. They hold no emotion.
I tell him about Quinn. I tell him how we met. I talk about how love blossomed out of friendship and how we got married. I talked about our lives, what we did, where we lived. I’m feeling something rise in me now, something I did not expect. I suppose it is remembering the past, when everything was new and the future spread out in front of us like an empty canvas waiting to be filled with color and movement and light. That something is welling out of me now. I’m stumbling on words, on phrases, on pictures. She is beautiful and all the world to me and I want to live and die in her arms. I can’t imagine anyone else that I would ever want to be with. And she blossoms with new life inside her. She grows and radiates joy and I’m falling deeper in love with her with every passing day.
---
Quinn turns quickly and throws her arms around me and I’m trapped against the cold steel door of the elevator.
“Make love to me, Judd,” she says and kisses me hard.
My head is reeling. I want her so badly. I want her more than anything in this world. I need her. She needs me. But this is not right for us, not now, not any more.
---
“I slept with someone.”
“What?” She says, stepping backwards.
---
She frowns. “I suppose I don’t have any right to be angry with you. I was still with Wade then, and we were separated.”
I nod.
“And I can’t make any claims on you now. I don’t know why I got angry, Judd. I think I got jealous. But after everything I know I don’t have the right to tell you who you can or can’t sleep with. It’s stupid and maybe a little unfair, but I guess I always thought it would only be me.”
---
“Judd, I think I’m ready,” she says finally. I pull away and she takes a deep breath. “I’m ready to talk to someone.”
---
“What are we doing here, Judd?” she asks me.
“We’re having coffee,” I tell her.
“Don’t be smart,” she says, but there is nothing of her usual chiding for my stupid answers. “I mean with us. What are we doing?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“Please, Judd. I don’t need you to be evasive. Not now.”
“I don’t know,” I say again. And I don’t. We’ve been in the kind of limbo for almost a month, where we skirt around our feelings, deny them because we’re afraid, but simultaneously becoming addicted to the furtive hope that simmers under the surface.
I love her. I want her. I forgive her. I’ve just been hurt so much that I don’t know if I can trust her. And, if I were to trust her again, that was certainly going to be a long time from now.
“Judd...”
I sigh. “It’s come to this then. We’re both afraid to be the first one to say it.”
She leans forward. Her eyes are filling. “It’s going to have to be you. I don’t know anymore and I need my husband to make a decision for us. What’s it going to be?”
---
I take a deep breath, steady myself. “Okay,” I say. “It’s like this: I still have feelings for you, Quinn – deep feelings. I still love you in a way, and that’s very inconvenient, because you’ve hurt me so very much. I’ve forgiven you, but that hurt remains and it’s confusing me. I don’t know if I can trust you again. And I don’t know if I can trust the way that I feel either, because it’s because we have this long and wonderful history and that’s what I’m remembering, not the last year that wasn’t real and was broken.”
Her head is bowed, she’s not crying but she can’t look at me either.
“And when I see you like this,” I continue, “I just love you all the more. I just want to hold you and protect you and try and make everything alright.”
I shake my head slowly. “I think that this is a lost cause, but Grant says that the lost causes are really the only ones worth fighting for. And I’m looking at you and I’m starting to believe that I can fight for this lost cause. I’m starting to believe that I can fight for you, because when you take everything away that stands between us, I do love you, Quinn Altman, and I’m a fool for doing it.
---
“So, we’re actually going to do this,” she asks me. “We’re going to fight for us?”
“We are. I think there is too much at stake not to. I think that there is too much to lose to let this go…”
---
“How is your homework going?” Grant asks me.
I tell him about what I’ve been through in the week, now I’d made a decision for us when she asked me to. I had come to the point where I accepted that I loved her and that I wanted a future with her. Quinn did the rest.
“I want to talk about bitterness,” he says after that, and I’m not sure I know where he’s going. “When we don’t forgive then we foster bitterness in our heart,” he tells me.
“I’ve forgiven her.”
“I know, but I’m sure you know that forgiveness is something that we do on an ongoing basis, especially when we’ve been hurt.”
“I get that.”
“Good. And forgiveness is an intentional act. Some
times it’s hard to forgive, real hard, but the forgiving heart will forgive regardless. When we don’t we allow bitterness into our hearts and it slowly poisons us.”
---
“So,” Grant says finally, “next week we’ll start together. Is that what you want?”
I nod. Quinn says yes. She’s been crying again, but less so than last week. She doesn’t look like she’s had her entire life turned upside down – which in reality it has. Both our lives were a shambles, but there was hope in sight to put everything back, at least to some order. Nothing would be in the same place again.
“Good. So, we have some homework to do during the week… We’d like you to write down your story, like you’ve already told us. You haven’t told each other your stories and that’s what we’re going to do next week.”
Monday
I can’t help thinking about what Grant has said. I guess that’s the point. I’m alone, I’m solitary, and that is the best time to think about what really matters, and Grant is giving me clues to what they are.
If I’m really being honest, I’m starting to enjoy being alone. There are no pressures. I don’t have to work hard at making anyone happy but myself, at least when I’m at home. I don’t have to worry about clothes on the floor or replacing the toilet paper. I don’t have to worry about toothpaste residue in the sink or arguing about not buying milk on the way home. All of those things are the little annoyances in a marriage that, in of themselves inconsequential, but when viewed with a bigger picture are symptoms of much deeper woes.
And that was how we were. That is what summed up the last year of our marriage. When