I reach for my purse. He flinches as though I hit him.

“At least let me take you home,” he says in despair.

“No. I think I want to walk today. Can you have Colin deliver my things to the apartment?”

“You can’t walk home, Chrissie. There are at least two dozen photographers at the curb waiting to pounce on you. Don’t be unreasonable about this.”

How could I have forgotten about the tabloids?

“Then I’ll go with Colin alone. Can you call him for me? I want to go to the garage alone.”

I rush quickly from the bedroom. I head for the foyer. I listen. I’m so relieved that Alan doesn’t follow me. I press the elevator button and the doors open. I couldn’t leave if he followed me, but that he didn’t really hurts me.

I lean back into the icy metal wall and stare at the square mirror images of myself. Oh, please doors close! Close quickly! Then I realize I haven’t pushed the garage button. I hit it and I’m numb. The metal moves, taking me away.

Oh god—I’ve left him. Alan Manzone asked me to marry him and I’ve walked away. The only guy I’ve ever loved. The only guy who will ever understand me. The second the door slammed closed I knew it with certainty: Alan is the love of my life. Crippling pain slices through me and I’m not at all sure I’ve made the right decision.

The love of my life…and I walked away.  What have I done? The pain is indescribable, but I can’t surrender to my grief. I’ve got to pack up my mother’s things with Jack, catch a plane, and somehow return to Santa Barbara and fix my perfectly fucked up life.

Deep down I know I’m doing the right thing. The right thing for Alan. The right thing for me. It just doesn’t feel that way today. Alan is right: I never know what I want, but I always know how I feel.

~~~

Everything seems longer and slower and harder. Usually any return home feels faster and easier because it’s familiar. There is nothing familiar today. It is just long and slow and hard.

I have survived the first day without Alan and the trip to the airport with Jack. Internally I’m still messy, but a different kind of messy. Parts of me have been quieted, new parts of me stirred awake, parts of me I leave behind, and parts of me I take.

I repeat that last part in my head. I want to put it in my journal once we are aboard the plane. There should be something in my journal about Alan.

We’re ushered into the VIP wait lounge in the airport terminal, and for today that is more about me than Jack. The tabloids have been our crushing shadow all day. I don’t care. They don’t know what the last three weeks have been about, and they never will. Let them write what they want. No one other than Alan and I will ever know or understand it.

It is too honest. Too human. Too real. I love Alan and he loves me. That’s it. End of story. And I leave New York for the simple reason that that is what girls like me do. We say goodbye. We board the plane. We go home and fix our own shit.

Jack hasn’t said a word since we finished clearing out Mom’s personal things from the apartment. It never occurred to me until I came to New York that Mom’s things were exactly where she left them and Sammy’s room remains exactly the same as it was that day. Jack has lockboxes too. I’m like him that way: keeping things in little boxes, hurting privately and slow to share my pain.

Jack’s silence today is more about him than about me, and I’m OK with that. I understand it because I said goodbye to Alan today.

More airport security comes when it is time for us to board the plane, and by how everyone on the plane stares at us I can tell we are the last ones on the plane even though our seats are first class.

I laugh. No proletarian seats today.

We’re in the air before Jack speaks.

“It’s going to be OK, Chrissie. It will all blow over. It always does.”

But I don’t want it to blow over. I’m in love with Alan.

I smile. “Why did Rene leave yesterday?”

I was so consumed with Alan I didn’t stop yesterday to wonder why Rene left me.

“The school is graduating you early, Chrissie. They remarked that they would prefer you clear out your things on Sunday so as not to disturb the returning students. Rene and Patty are packing up your things from your dorm room today.”

Oh shit.

“Are the Thompsons angry we’ve been kicked out of school? I know how Rene’s mom feels about never having the crap be public.”

Jack gives me a small smile. “They didn’t kick out Rene. She left in solidarity and the Thompsons are cool with it.”

It’s awful, but I start to laugh anyway. I can’t help it. I was kicked out of school before Rene. What were the odds of that?  I laugh harder and Jack laughs, and suddenly we are laughing in a crazed way that doesn’t match any of this.

When the laughter quiets, it is a comfortable thing. A comfortable thing, for the first time, in a very long time, between Jack and me.

“I think tomorrow we should go buy you a new car,” Jack says somewhere over Colorado. “A Volvo. The safest car on the road, but not flashy. Hopefully, it won’t be something anyone wants to steal.”

OK, what’s up with that? I expected to be dragged to an in-care lockdown therapy center. What’s with the car shopping, Jack? Things might be better between us, but it doesn’t make Jack’s parenting any less confusing.

“Why are we buying me a Volvo?”

“You’re out of school early, Chrissie. You were planning a road trip across country this summer with Rene. Leave early. Get lost for a while. Let it all go. Sometimes it’s the only way you can find yourself.”

I smile and think of Alan. Jack is right, but I also think I might have already found myself, and that returning to Santa Barbara is a very big mistake.

When Jack falls asleep, I pull out my journal and make my Alan entry. I stare at the newspaper photo I have tucked there. I love this photo of Alan and me. Us on the terrace, curled around each other, waiting for the sunrise. How did they get it? Telephoto lens? I wonder if you can ever get a real photo from a newspaper. It just seems to capture us, and everything that was us, through these unexpected weeks. I start to cry. The caption is cruel and wrong, those fuckers in the press never get anything right, but the photo is totally us.

I wish I could see the future. I wish I knew with complete certainty if my decision were right. I wish I were older, looking back after having gotten through this.

What if I had stayed?

I turn to stare out the window. I can’t see the earth and I can’t see the sun and I can’t see the journey ahead of me.

~~~

Chrissie’s Journal September 1989

It’s funny how something can consume your life and then just disappear. After spring break in New York, I never burned myself again. I try to make sense of it all, but I can’t. If anything should have fueled my self-burning addiction, it should have been leaving Alan and realizing I’ve lost him for good.

I read the self-help books that Rene’s mother gave to me when I returned to Santa Barbara. They all confirm the same thing: that my illness is not something that should just end.  It would require long-term counseling to resolve my issues that created such a destructive disorder. But I skipped the counseling and just went across country with Rene in the Volvo my dad purchased for us, started UC Berkeley in the fall as planned, and when I arrived at school it was gone, and the impulse to burn my flesh hasn’t come again.

I think of Alan every day and yet the impulse, the whispering sadness, the need to hurt myself stays away.

I’m grateful that the burning thing is over, but I still can’t help wondering why it ended. Maybe it’s as simple as having the fragments of memory form into a clear picture of that horrid night Sammy OD’d, so that I can now deal honestly with my brother’s death. Maybe it’s as simple as having confronted Jack and starting the process of working through my issues with my father. Maybe it’s as simple as Alan asking me never to do it again for him. I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure how I got beyond the obsession to burn myself, but I did, and it ended.