Brackets

She appears in brackets before she has a name. Was it cowardice? Afraid to let her on the page, so close to my words. Or was it craft? Clarification: she was in the same story she was kept out of.

Her first mention comes in the last chapter of the memoir's first movement, Slurry, after laying out the origin story, the mess that eventually dried into my path.

Chapter: [What About Nicole?]

[What about Nicole?]

What about Nicole?

[You're not going to mention her?]

I wasn't going to, no. Not here.

[Not where?]

Not here at this part.

[But you are going to mention her, right?]

In time.

It's her. It's her interrogating me, keeping me honest. Also wanting to be part of my slurry. I drop her for two movements, keeping her out of the Pavement and the Footprint, then I pick her up and call her by name in the fourth movement, Detour, because that's where she was.

I write our story. I do it to honor her. She opens Detour.

Chapter: The Year of the Niki

We hosted movie night at our house. Moana. I grabbed a toy microphone and belted out the solo I had been practicing in the car all year with the kids.

I sang it right to her, "This is not who you are. You know who you are." We met for the first time.

Her husband played the guitar, and she started a band for us and let in a slew of reasons to be in each other's presence where we felt a foreign peace. The image I had of us was so clear, two little old ladies sitting together at a diner, laughing and drinking too much coffee. I wanted it to be true.

She knew what it was before I did, and despite my best efforts, she could not keep her feet in her marriage. When she left, I ran fast down the east coast to not be the cause. When she left, I left, causing more destruction. Transformation was not yet visible from the loop.

[Why did you leave?]

I took her in with great detail that day. A sparkly star hairpin shooting straight out of dark as night curls. Bronze eyelids outlined indigo. No longer dressed all in gray. She touched my cheek goodbye. Held my face and closed her eyes. Said it all with touch, instead. The healing kind that woke in me a love I never knew next to a man.

[That's not an answer, that's a story.]

This is a story. This is what I do to remember how it went.

She accused me of turning her into a story. That was real. See how mad she is in brackets? It's me, trying to contain a fire. She foreshadows the ending. I leave. She already knows. I want to believe she already knows.

In the very next chapter, I retell the story of her husband's anger on the night she came out. It was her secret to keep but mine to tell. It ends with how we loved each other, which was my secret.

Chapter: Identify Yourself

I stayed on the phone with her until she pulled up my driveway in the middle of a summer night, the night she confessed her love for me.

The moon lit our way from the driveway to the horseshoe garden of sunflowers that my kids planted in the backyard. The happiness garden, they called it.

"If you go in mad, you can't come out until you're not anymore."

That was the rule.

We sat in the center of the happiness garden and held hands, awaiting the sun with the flowers.

She plucked apart a small flower from a seedling at our feet and handed me a perfectly formed soft petal of yellow that lay dying in my hand.

Our feet were bare and cold in the wet grass. The bullfrogs sang. The cattails swayed. Our hearts beat fast and strong. We sat and cried and wished a wish big enough for two stars.

She returns in brackets a few chapters later to close out the fourth movement. To have the last word. After being in the story, then not being in the story, she wants more page time. She knows it's over, no question. She feels the final section coming and grasps at inevitable emptiness.

Chapter: Meanwhile

[Say more about Nicole, please.]

My actions have shouted enough.

She was the afterthought, she would say. The thing not even in the same library as the page I was on. The thing so given that I didn't think to protect it. The thing I had not asked for. Not for her, not for the unraveling.

[Were you ever in love with her?]

We were love. A love like a flame burnt truth that consumed homes and families.

Love like a trick.

[Do you regret her?]

She was the pile of feathers caught me falling out of trash bags. I thank her.

We healed an old wound, the kind you have to rip back open and maybe break some things that are okay but that are preventing you from healing over properly. Or like the trunk of a wounded tree that will grow stronger all around the wound every year, returning to the impact site, surviving its divide, and moving on until it has surpassed the wound entirely and grown on, unscathed.

We were a delicately soft knitted sweater. A loose thread was seen and pulled, and then another, and then all of them, too many to maintain its integrity until we were a yarn heap that neither of us knew how to fix.

[Then thank her.]

Her flame. You feel it.

Thank you.

[And?]

And I'm sorry.

[For?]

Nothing. I would do it again, tricks and all.

Then, in the penultimate chapter, it happens. I leave her. And I do what I did not do, which is just tell her the goddamned truth.

We're at the Apple Festival in New York with her kids, and I'm flying to Florida next week to be with mine. To move to Florida, to be with them, to not be with her. She and her kids go to get snacks, and I stand on a hill and transform before the end of my memoir.

"You look happy," she says, handing me some caramel apple popcorn, smiling, sparkling. It's right before I reach into her chest and pull out her still-beating heart, trying to pump blood that no longer runs through.

"Put this somewhere safe," I say, handing it to her.

And then I give her the closure she said she wanted but that no one really wants. And I get it. I see why we tell people to say these things to us. The words weren't even true until my breath filled them with the stale air that I had held in for as long as I'd been unable to say them. 

"What do you want, Niki?" she asked, prompting my line.

"I want to be loved right by a man."

And then it's just me. She's nowhere to be found. Beyond brackets.

I left you there, Nicole.

Maybe you're still there.

Slurry. Pavement. Footprint. Detour. Finish Line.

I walked away and built a story for the story. It's for protection, but I'm still not sure of what: her, myself, or the book.