“I came here to kill myself,” she blurts out.
This is the gift random strangers can give you, Phoebe is realizing—the freedom to say or be anything around them. Because who cares? He doesn’t know her, will never know her. He will list all kinds of reasons why she shouldn’t die, and she will tell him that she is not planning to die anymore, and then they will get out of the hot tub and carry on with their lives and never think about each other again.
But all he says is “Shit,” like she stepped in a puddle of mud. It makes what she said sound small and fixable. Like something he understood.
“Perhaps I should have added that I decided not to,” she says.
“That’s actually a pretty crucial detail,” he says. Then he adds, “I shouldn’t joke like that. I’m sorry.”
“No, please. Joke,” she says. “It’s the only part of this that could ever be any fun.”
“May I ask how you were going to do it?”
“Professor Stone, with the cat painkillers, in the Roaring Twenties,” she says.
“Cat painkillers? That’s a little…”
“Cliché?”
“No,” he laughs. “Ineffective. Who uses cat painkillers?”
“Apparently people who are not setting themselves up for success.”
“So, you came all this way to kill yourself with some cat’s painkillers—”
“I mean, it wasn’t just some cat. It was my cat.”
“—and get surprised by a fucking wedding?”
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why I couldn’t do it. That and the lack of room service.”
“Personally, I never kill myself unless there’s room service,” he says.
She laughs—it feels like a cloud slipping out her mouth, floating up to the sky.
“And the air conditioner,” she says, “smelled weird.”
“Say no more.”
Suddenly, it all seems so ridiculous to her. So funny.
“I’m sorry you’ve been in that much pain,” he says. “I know what that can feel like.”
She stares at him. Now she’s the one surprised by his honesty. “Have you ever … tried?”
“Not exactly,” he says. “But I came close. A few years ago, I used to think about it a lot.”
“And now you don’t?”
“Now I don’t.”
“How did you stop?”
“Honestly, I think I just waited. That, and I watched Breaking Bad every night for a month.”
“The therapeutic cures of drug deals gone awry.”
“You joke, but by the end of it, I felt actual relief that I was not Walter White. Like, at least I didn’t shoot myself with my own machine gun after being hunted by my own brother-in-law.”
“Hey, spoiler,” she says.
He laughs. “It’s been ten years! Come on.”
Then they just sit there in silence, heads rested back against the tub, and enjoy the warmth, as if they’ve shared something vital. As if they are no longer alone with themselves or their secrets. She looks up at the sky, and his foot brushes against her leg.
“Sorry,” he says, very quickly, but she likes it. She feels a flutter of something she hasn’t felt in a long time. She has just been touched after hours by a man who is not her husband, and yes, it was just an accidental foot tap, but it felt unbelievable to her. Maybe because she is supposed to be dead by now or maybe because she is supposed to be her husband’s wife. Or maybe she just wants to fuck him?
“Do you have any other secrets?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“Tell me one.”
“I don’t even know you,” he says.
“Isn’t it better that way?” she asks.
He considers this. “Once in college, I became addicted to my girlfriend’s romance novels. We started reading one together as a joke, but then I actually got hooked. I mean, I got completely addicted. Read them for months. So there you have it.”
