He'd looked at me the way he did when I disappointed him, which was worse than anger.I could handle angry Jimmy.Angry Jimmy was loud and sharp and burned out fast.Disappointed Jimmy was quiet, and quiet Jimmy burrowed under my skin and stayed there for days.
But now, watching the tunnel lights strobe past the window, I was sure the news would fix things.How could it not?I'd gotten the job.Not a maybe, not a callback.Bruce Coleman, the Vice President of Programming at Beacon Broadcasting, had looked me in the eye and said I made people trust me.That had to count for something.
He'd come around.Jimmy always did.That was the thing about us — we fought like two people who cared too much, and we always found our way back to each other.We'd been together since sophomore year.Two years of late nights in the campus newsroom, of stolen kisses in the editing bay when we were supposed to be cutting packages, of whispering plans to each other about the famous journalists we'd become.We'd moved in together junior year, into that fourth-floor walk-up off Morningside with the radiator that clanked like a ghost was trapped inside it.Two years of sharing a bed, a bathroom, a life.He knew how I took my coffee.I knew the exact pitch of his laugh when something genuinely surprised him.
And the best part?We didn't have to go anywhere.Beacon was here.Every major outlet in the country had its home in this city — PBS included, which Jimmy would appreciate.He could find work in a heartbeat.We'd finally start building the life we'd been talking about since we were twenty, stupid, and so in love it hurt to breathe.
The train surfaced into the last of the daylight as it pulled into my stop, and I closed my eyes and smiled.
Everything was going to be fine.
* * *
I came up out of the station just as the last of the daylight was bleeding out of the sky over the Hudson, and I half-ran the two blocks home, my bag bouncing against my hip.
The front door of the building was propped open with a brick, the way it always was when old Mrs.Lewis on the first floor had her windows open and wanted the cross-breeze.I took the stairs two at a time.
When I reached our door on the fourth floor I fumbled with my keys.Dropped them.They clattered against the hallway tile, and I laughed at myself as I scooped them up, because my hands were shaking.
I got the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.
The joy drained out of me so fast it left me dizzy.
The apartment was half empty.Surgically, deliberately empty.The bookshelf against the far wall, the one we'd hauled up four flights of stairs together, cursing and laughing the whole way — stripped bare on Jimmy's side.His records, gone.The vintage turntable he'd found at that flea market in Hell's Kitchen, gone.The kitchen, visible through the open pass-through, was missing his cast iron skillet, his French coffee press, the mismatched mugs he collected from every city he'd ever visited.The coat hooks by the door held only my jacket.The space where his boots usually sat was now just empty floor.
"Jimmy?"
My voice hit the bare walls and came back to me sounding thin and foreign, like it belonged to someone else.The apartment had never echoed before.There had always been too much life in it for echoes.
"Jimmy!"Louder this time.
Nothing.
I set my bag down slowly, carefully, the way you set things down when you're trying to convince yourself that everything is normal and you are not about to fall apart.That's when I saw it.A single sheet of paper on the coffee table, folded once, with my name written across the front in Jimmy's slanted handwriting.
My hands weren't shaking in the good way anymore.
I picked up the note and unfolded it.
Nelson,
For an hour I've been trying to figure out how to write this.I've started over four times, and every version sounds wrong, so I'm just going to say it the ugly way and hope you understand.
I'm leaving.I packed while you were downtown interviewing for a job I begged you not to consider, and the fact that you went anyway — that you smiled at me this morning, kissed me goodbye, and went anyway — tells me everything I've been too afraid to admit for months.
I don't recognize you anymore, Nelson.And I've tried.God, I have tried.I have lain awake in our bed listening to you breathe and tried to find the guy I fell in love with sophomore year — the one who cried over that story about the abandoned man found dead in his house after three months.You were the one who said journalism was supposed to be a service, not a spotlight.That guy would never have looked at Beacon Broadcasting and seen a dream.He would have seen a machine.
But this version of you?He sees a stage.And I can't stand next to you on it and pretend that's okay, because it's not.It's not okay.You don't want to report the news, Nelson.You want to BE the news.And that terrifies me, because I still love you so much it makes my chest ache, and loving you isn't enough to make me stay and watch you become someone we both used to laugh at.
I only took the things that are mine.I left the things that are ours.I don't want them.Every time I'd look at that stupid desk we sanded down on the sidewalk, I'd think of you with sawdust in your hair, laughing so hard you couldn't breathe, and I'd fall apart.So keep all of it.
Please don't call me.I mean it.If you call, I'll answer, and if I answer, I'll come back, and if I come back, I'll lose myself trying to hold on to someone who's already gone.
I hope you get everything you want.I just can't be here when you do.
Jimmy
I read it twice, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something that made sense, something that didn't reach into my chest and tear out my heart.I sank onto the couch — my couch now, just mine — and pressed the note against my chest.