The Voicemail

The dress hangs on the closet door where I can see it from the bed, and I’ve been staring at it for the better part of an hour without actually seeing it at all. My shoes are still in their box by the dresser. The jewelry Vinny's mother lent me for my something borrowed sits in a small velvet tray on top of the dresser, catching what little light comes through the blinds. My suitcase is half packed on the chair, a sweater draped over the edge of it, and everything in this room is arranged around the fact that tomorrow I am getting married, and none of it is helping me sleep.

Earlier today, while I was getting my nails done, the woman doing them asked if I was excited, and I said yes, and she smiled and said, can you believe tomorrow you finally get your forever. The word stuck itself somewhere behind my ribs and it has not let go since. Finally. As if I have been waiting this whole time for the version of forever that was supposed to happen, and tomorrow it simply resumes where it left off.

I reach for my phone without thinking. My thumb already knows where to go, the way it has known for years, past the photos and the messages I never delete, down to the voicemail I have never once let myself lose. I press play and hold the phone to my ear the way I always do, like if I hold it just right some of him might still be in the room with me.

There’s a beat of static first, the sound of him walking, keys jingling, an engine passing wherever he was. Then his voice, a little rushed, the way it always was when he was excited about something and trying not to sound like it.

“Hey, Ris, it’s me. I know you’re still mad, and you have every right to be, but I’ve been thinking about what you said, and you were right. I’ve been scared of messing up something that already feels perfect, which is the stupidest reason to be scared of anything.” He lets out a short laugh. “Let’s do it, Ris. Let’s get married. I don’t want someday anymore, I want it to be an actual day, so call me back and let’s figure it out. I’ll see you later. I love you.”

I know every breath in it. I know the half-second pause before he says I love you, as if he's gathering the nerve to say something that should be easy, and the little click at the end when he hangs up too fast. I have listened to this so many times that I could recite it in my sleep, and still, every single time, it breaks me exactly the same way. By the time it ends tears are streaming down my face.

I lower the phone from my ear just as the message finishes its last second of silence, and when I look up, Vinny is standing in the doorway with a folded piece of paper in his hand.

He's very still. The vows he's been rewriting all week are folded between his fingers. He must have been coming to say goodnight before disappearing into the guest room like we'd promised we would tonight.

"Marissa," he says carefully.

He crosses the room and sits down on the edge of the bed beside me, close enough that our shoulders almost touch but not quite. He doesn't ask what I'm doing. Or why I'm crying. He just sits there for a moment while I wipe my face with the back of my hand, embarrassed in a way I can't fully explain, like I've been caught doing something I wasn't supposed to do, even though he has always known this voicemail existed.

"Why tonight?" he asks, finally, his voice tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.

"I haven't listened to it in months," I say. "I don't even remember the last time."

That’s a lie. I remember. The last time I listened to the voicemail was March eighteenth, Hunter's birthday, and I sat in my car in a grocery store parking lot and played it twice before I could make myself go inside.

"In March?" Vinny asks quietly.

I don't trust my voice, and I can't look at him as I nod slowly.

There are times I forget the voicemail exists at all, and then something reminds me of Hunter and I'll listen to it two or three nights in a row. Tonight I just needed to hear him.

Vinny doesn't say anything for a while. He looks at his hands, the vows still folded between his fingers.

I close my eyes and I'm not in this room anymore. I'm in the apartment Hunter and I shared, with the water stain on the ceiling neither of us ever got around to fixing. We had been together for four years by then, and I was tired of someday, tired of watching him change the subject every time I brought up the future. I remember asking him, flat out, where we were going. He told me he wasn't ready. I remember how small it made years feel.

We argued. I said things I meant and things I didn't. I left angry. Then he called me the next afternoon. I was at my desk at work, and I saw his name on the screen, and I let it ring. I remember thinking, very simply, I'll call him back later. It was just a small, human, careless thing, the kind we all do a hundred times without consequence.

The voicemail notification appeared a minute later. I didn't listen to it. There would be time.

But there wasn't. Two hours after that, his mother called to tell me there had been an accident.

I didn't listen to his voicemail until a week later, after nights of not sleeping in the apartment that still smelled like him. When I finally played it, I heard him say he'd changed his mind. That he wanted to marry me. That he'd see me later.

"He's asking you to marry him," Vinny says, breaking the silence. "That's why it's always been hard."

"You never said anything," I tell him, surprised.

"How was I supposed to?"

I get up from the bed and cross to the dresser, where the jewelry sits waiting in its little velvet tray, and I start straightening it, the earrings, the bracelet, though none of it needs straightening. My hands just need something to do that isn't holding my phone.

"You told me about him before we were even really together," Vinny goes on behind me. "I've met his mother. I know his birthday. I've never once asked you to stop visiting him or stop telling me stories about him, because none of that has ever felt like a threat to me."

"Then why does this?"

"Because tomorrow I'm going to stand in front of everyone we love and promise you my life," he says, and his voice catches slightly on the word promise. "And tonight you're listening to someone else do the same thing."

The words find the bruise I've spent years protecting, and I hate him for pressing it with such gentle hands.

"He died, Vinny." I turn around. "I didn't leave him. He didn't leave me. It just ended. What do you want me to do, pretend I stopped loving him the day I met you?"

"No," he says, and he says it so plainly, without any heat in it, that it stops me for a second. "That's not what I'm asking."

"Then what are you asking?"

He looks down at the vows in his hands like he's forgotten he's holding them. "Do you know how horrible it feels to be jealous of someone who's dead?"

I stop moving. My hand is still on the bracelet, but I'm not adjusting it anymore.

"You don't have to be jealous of him," I say, quieter now.

"I know that. I know he's not some threat sitting across the aisle tomorrow." He finally sets the vows down on the nightstand, carefully, like they might tear. "But if he hadn't died, you would have married him."

I don't answer, because he's right, and we both know it.

"He wasn't perfect," I say, and my voice is rising now, and I'm moving again, toward the window, anywhere. "You say it like he's some fantasy. I knew his faults. He left dishes in the sink for a week. He forgot my birthday one year and tried to fix it by buying me a blender. He drove me insane."

"I believe you." he says. He still hasn't moved from the bed. "But I think sometimes you wonder what would have happened. If you'd still be happy. If you'd still be together right now instead of with me."

"You think I wish it was him," I say.

"No." He says it immediately, without hesitation, and something in the certainty of it stops me cold. "I think sometimes you wish you got to find out."

I don't have an answer for that, because it's true. I have wondered. Whether we would have made it. Whether marriage would have changed him, or me, whether we'd have had children, whether we'd still be standing in some kitchen together twenty years from now, tired and happy, or whether we'd have grown apart the way people sometimes do. I don't wish Vinny away. I don't wish for a different life. But I have wished I knew how the other story ended.

"I can't compete with what might've been," Vinny says quietly. "I don't need you to stop loving him. I need to know you're not still waiting for the life you were supposed to have with him."

"I'm not," I say.

He looks at the phone still in my hand. "Then why did you need him tonight?"

I have nowhere left to go. I'm standing with my back nearly to the window, the dresser behind me, the bed between us, and there's no answer I can give him that isn't the truth, and the truth is I don't have one.

“I don’t know,” I whisper.

The room is silent for a moment.

After a long while I look at him and ask, "Do you want me to delete it?"

He doesn't answer right away. When he does, his voice is low. "Part of me does."

My heart sinks at his admission.

"But I don't want you to do it because I asked," he says. "If you delete it for me, you'll resent me for it eventually, even if you don't mean to. I don't want to be the reason his voice is gone. I want you to decide if you still need it."

He stands. We had agreed to sleep separately tonight, some old wedding superstition neither of us really believed in, but also felt strongly about. At the door he turns back and says, "I love you, Marissa. I'll be there tomorrow."

"Even if I keep it?" I ask.

He pauses, and something almost like a smile moves across his face, sad and certain at once. "That's not really what I'm asking you to decide."

My throat tightens. “I love you.”

“I know.”

Then he's gone, the vows still sitting on the nightstand where he left them, and I'm alone with the phone in my hand.

I play the voicemail one more time. I let myself hear all of it—not just the part where he asks me to marry him, but the small laugh before it, the sound of him walking somewhere, the careless "I love you," the "call me back," all spoken by someone who had no idea there wouldn't be a later.

I think about the life we might have had. The house we might have bought. The kids we might have raised. I let myself go all the way into it this time, further than I ever have, and for the first time I let the picture get messy. Maybe he would have left towels on the bathroom floor for the rest of his life. Maybe we would have fought about money. Maybe marriage would have worn us down instead of building us up. Maybe we'd have grown into two people who loved each other and still couldn't make it work.

I don't know. Hunter has stayed inside every beautiful possibility because none of them ever had the chance to disappoint me.

Vinny isn't a possibility. I know what he looks like when he first wakes up, before he's fully human. I know the sound he makes when he's annoyed and trying not to show it. I know how he apologizes, clumsily, always over-explaining. I love him with all the answers already given, not the ones I imagine.

I get up and find the small external drive where I keep the photos Hunter's mother gave me, the screenshots of old messages, the handful of things I've saved so I never lose him completely. I move the voicemail file there, into the folder with everything else that is truly his, so it exists somewhere permanent, untouched.

Then I open my phone again and find the voicemail still sitting in its old place, waiting the way it always waits. Delete Voicemail? My thumb hovers over the words longer than it should. It feels like letting go of him all over again, the same helpless feeling from the day I heard he was gone.

I press delete.

The file disappears from the screen. I fold over the phone and cry until my chest hurts. I don't restore it, even though I want to.

Eventually I set the phone face down on the nightstand, beside the vows Vinny left behind.

Across the room, my dress still hangs where it has all night, waiting for tomorrow. Hunter's voice still exists, saved where I put it, folded into the photographs and messages and memory of a life that ended far too soon. But for the first time in years, when I reach for my phone, he won't be there waiting in my pocket.

I look at the dress a long time before I finally turn off the lamp.

Tomorrow, I’m getting married.