He put the cigarette to his mouth again and sucked in.
“You’re lying to yourself, Lilith.”
All the ways that he fucked me, the hard way, the honest way. An empty hunger rose in my body.
“You’re perverse,” he said. “You know? I should have known better.”
“Better than what?”
“The messages. All over Patrick’s phone!” he said. “You were talking to him this whole time? Maya came over and said you guys have been flirting for weeks. Do you just fuck anybody?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. I tensed the muscles in my throat. “I was with Jenny last night.”
Everything was failing. My constant attempt to get us together and alone, trying to figure out our great escape, to figure out when he would leave Frankie behind so we could run away together, the way I had suggested for Patrick and Maya. Because that was a love full of bliss, with all their crazy cousin-fucking, transcendental love, the lies, hiding, and of course, the ultimate manifestation of their love, the baby. Their illegal Lilith fucking love.
Nothing was real.
“Sure,” Matt said. “Sure, Lilith. Fucking Jenny too, I guess. Do you ever tell yourself the truth?”
I hadn’t told him about Jenny yet, but I didn’t think that he would care as much as he did. A hot buzz of embarrassment washed over my face. He cared, and that was exciting. To be possessed in some way. And now he was breaking up with me? Not him, but Frankie. And she sent him to do it? After all the time I spent getting him to sneak around, working up to being together, his fucking promises. The chance had come and instead he was breaking up with me. That was perverse.
The six missed calls made sense now. Frankie was the decision-maker. It had to be her. He was just doing her bidding, letting her control him.
With that, he stormed off. I ran after him until I got to the door of RadioShack.
“Matt!” I yelled. “Please don’t leave!”
“Come get your shit later,” he shouted back. I watched him walk to his Malibu, hands in his pockets, head down.
Everything I’ve heard about the night before they broke up with me is heresay. Bits and pieces from Jenny, from friends of friends.
What I heard was Maya stormed over to Matt and Frankie’s. Frankie was her closest friend, the only other mom she knew. Frankie was also the only person Maya talked to about her relationship with Patrick.
This is how I picture it: Maya is there in the dining room. It is the same dining room I sat down in the first night I met Matt and Frankie, magazines and salt crumbs all over the table, high chair against the wall. The light is the same yellow light you always get when the sun sets, when it leaks through the blinds and shows how the dust has settled on every surface, how nothing is how it seems in the dark. Matt is sitting in the chair he always sits in, and this time Frankie is sitting in the chair I usually sit in because I’m not there. I’m in Jenny’s basement, tongue deep in all that is holy about her. Maya is sitting in Frankie’s chair. She’s breathing hard, shaking, upset. She’s saying things to Matt and Frankie about the messages she found and how she can’t get hold of Patrick at all. When Maya mentions the prospect of Patrick and I together, something changes in Matt. He gets jealous.
This was something I never understood about what brought the whole thing down until now, just now when I’m telling you. When I said jealousy fucked things up at first, I meant that about Frankie. I thought it was about her, how she couldn’t be honest about her feelings and how that made me better than her. The lack of honesty made everything spin out of control. I got too complacent in that, I got lazy. Honesty is hard. Matt pulled me closer to him and I let it happen. I wanted that. It was warm and easy.
Now that I sit here telling you this, this wreck that defined me for so long, I am laughing so hard. Because it’s in this moment with the yellow light and the dust and Frankie sitting in my chair that she sees it so clearly on Matt’s face. He’s jealous.
Matt was jealous. He thought I was going behind his back, of all things, the sweet twist of a knife he thought was in someone else’s back. Frankie saw the jealousy on his face like a stain, like the one I have lived with all these years, this mark, this curse of Cain, the fractured piece of shit heart they left me with. Lilith.
Jealousy is the admission to yourself that you are replaceable.
In that moment, Matt felt betrayed by what he thought was my lying, my perceived “unfaithfulness” to his irreplaceability.
Nothing lasts.
Maybe because Frankie had known him all those years, she could see his tics better than anyone else. She could feel it rise on the skin like electricity, see the hairs prick up on his forearms. Frankie could read it on his face. The kind of rage that burns so deep, a hole in the shape of me is left inside of him. He thought I was his and only his. I was no longer special Lilith but a common whore.
When Frankie called me that night, when she called over and over again and I didn’t pick up, it must have confirmed for them some truth. Some alternate reality where everything was meant to happen exactly as it did.
THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT THIS TIME AROUND
I SHOWED UP AT Matt and Frankie’s to return Marilyn Manson’s autobiography. Inside it, I placed a CD that I had burned a
