Uh-oh

For a moment, I thought his head might actually begin to spin.

He was propped against the headboard, his broken foot elevated on a lopsided stack of pillows, a law school textbook spread open across his lap. The room was quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioner. I had only come in to tell him that my mother and sisters were driving up for a visit.

He said he needed the apartment quiet so he could study.

I told him we were going out and wouldn’t be staying there. They were coming anyway.

That was all it took.

His face changed so quickly I hardly recognized him. His jaw tightened. His skin flushed from his neck to his forehead. Then he began repeating the same words in a low, furious hiss.

“I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”

 At first, the words didn’t register. Then I understood what he was saying. My whole body went numb.

I stood in the doorway staring at him, thinking of Linda Blair confined to her bed in The Exorcist, her head beginning its slow, impossible rotation.

He had never said those words to me before. And then, just as quickly, it was gone. His face went back to normal. 

I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I stood there with my hands on the sink, trying to figure out what to do.

Several minutes later, I heard him moving around in the bedroom, opening drawers and gathering things. Then I heard his crutches thumping across the floor.

On his way out, he called through the bathroom door, “I’m going to my parents’ for a few days to cool off.”

I waited until I heard the car engine start. Then I went to the front door and turned the deadbolt.

With my hand still on the lock, I knew.

It was over.

I would never let him set foot in the apartment again.

Until that day, ending it had been something I imagined but never believed I could do. The threat was what finally did it. But it wasn’t the only reason I was ready to leave. By then, I’d started to imagine a life without him. 

To understand how I got there, I have to go back several months, to a slow afternoon in a university library and something I stumbled into because I was curious.

***

There were four of us in the copy cataloging department: me, Linda, Karen, and Ashley. We were responsible for adding new books to the library’s collection. Our office was upstairs, separate from the rest of the library, and most of the time no one paid much attention to us.

One day Linda leaned around her computer. "Have y’all tried the Yahoo! chat rooms?" None of us had. She showed us rows of screen names scrolling past, people from all over the world typing messages to strangers they couldn’t see. You could enter a room, join the conversation, or message someone privately. Within a week, all four of us had screen names.

Linda was already talking to an older man in Chicago, Karen soon found someone in London, and Ashley remained more hesitant than the rest of us. 

I started out in the Movie Quote Trivia room. That's where I met him.

His screen name was Schwinn72_NJ. Mine was LibraryGirl_97. 

He messaged me first. “What’s your favorite movie of all time?”

We traded titles and movie quotes until he asked if I wanted to join him in a private room.

“ASL?” he typed.

In chat-room shorthand, it meant age, sex, location.

“22/F/AL. You?” I typed back.

“25/M/NJ. What’s your name?”

“Molly. Yours?”

“Nick. Are you seeing anyone?”

“Yeah. About three years now. He’s in law school.”

“What about you?”

“I have a girlfriend. We’ve been together since tenth grade. Everyone assumes we’ll get married eventually. We’ve been together so long, it’s just what’s supposed to happen.”

He asked if I had ever “cybered,” which was chat-room shorthand for acting out sex through typed messages. I told him no. What followed was clumsy and a little ridiculous. I kept covering my mouth so I wouldn’t laugh while Linda and Karen leaned over my shoulder, trying to read the screen. We laughed so hard I thought someone would come upstairs to see what was happening.

It was the first and last time we chatted that way.

He came online most afternoons, after his graduate classes, before his evening job. He spent much of his free time cycling, which explained the screen name. 

***

I hadn’t grown up religious. In a small Alabama town, that made me an exception. When I met him three years earlier and learned how devout he was, I counted it in his favor. Maybe being with him would help me fit in. Maybe if he was sure enough about all of it, I wouldn’t have to be. 

It took me too long to understand that his religion lived in his mouth, not his life. He hadn’t been to church in years, but he could quote scripture, declare himself right with God, and call me worldly and a sinner. The music I listened to, South Park, and Stephen King novels were all too “worldly” for him. Almost anything I enjoyed could become proof that I needed saving. 

"You don't go to church," I told him once.

"Going to church doesn't save you. Accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior does."

“But how does watching a television show or reading a novel make me a sinner?”

“Because those things are secular.” 

We had versions of that argument over and over, and neither of us ever convinced the other of anything. 

***

One day, Nick told me about ICQ, an instant-messaging program that let us chat directly with each other. A knocking sound announced when someone came online. An incoming message made the computer chirp, “Uh-oh.”

The first time I heard it, I jumped.

Before long, that little alert became my own version of Pavlov’s bell. 

Pretty soon, we were talking about everything: school, jobs, where we lived. He shared an apartment with a friend from college. I told him I had a roommate.

I was finishing my undergraduate degree and had begun looking at graduate programs in library science, though I had no idea where I might apply. Nick asked what kind of job that would lead to, and I tried to explain that librarians did more than sit behind desks and stamp due dates.

“Maybe you could come to New Jersey,” he typed. “There are libraries everywhere around here. And you’d be close to New York City.”

I laughed it off. New Jersey might as well have been another country.

***

One night, we started arguing about my supposed sins again. This time, it got physical. I remember him backing me against the wall in the hallway, his hand flat against my shoulder, holding me there while he said it, low and close to my face.

“You're a sinner. You're a sinner. You need to get your life right with the Lord.”

He never changed my mind. But after hearing I was a sinner often enough, I started to wonder if something was wrong with me. 

***

Then came the pictures.

I didn’t have a scanner at home, so I used the one in the periodicals room, thinking how strange it was to be doing this for someone in New Jersey I had never stood in the same room with.

Nick didn’t have one either. He went out and bought one.

His picture came through in strips. First his hair, then his eyes, then that crooked smile. 

Now the person behind the keyboard had a face.

Soon we were talking on the phone. The calls got longer and longer, from forty minutes to an hour or more. Talking to him gave me somewhere else to go, even if I never left my desk. 

I started to hate Fridays. That was when his girlfriend came for the weekend and ICQ went quiet. No “uh-oh.” Nothing.

I was jealous, which was ridiculous. I had someone too and absolutely no right to feel that way.

***

I wanted to see Titanic in the theater, and he agreed to go, which surprised me.

“Not really my kind of movie,” he said, “but everyone’s talking about it.”

Somewhere in the middle, I started crying. Once I began, I couldn’t stop. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He just reached over, covered my hand with his, and left it there.

When the movie ended, I was still crying, my face hot and swollen.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I wiped my eyes. “It’s just so sad.”

But it wasn’t only the movie. I kept thinking about Nick, about two people finding each other and still having no way to be together.

I’m never going to meet him, I thought. This is all it will ever be.

***

It was a holiday weekend. We had a day off, but I went into the library anyway and called Nick from the phone at my desk.

We had been talking for more than an hour when he went quiet.

“Can I tell you something?” he said. “I think I’m in love with you.”

We had never met in person, but by then that almost didn’t seem to matter. 

“I think I’m in love with you too,” I said.

Neither of us spoke. We stayed on the phone, a thousand miles apart.

After we hung up, I sat alone in a building that was supposed to be empty. I didn’t feel guilty. 

I was still sitting at the same desk, and I still had to go home to the same apartment. The same apartment was waiting for me, along with the same arguments and the same feeling that I was living the wrong life.

But now I knew I wanted out. 

***

The apartment went quiet. No “uh-oh.” No sound at all.

What came next surprised me.

Relief.

I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted him gone until he was.

For years, I had told myself this was the life I was supposed to have. I had chosen it because it seemed like the right thing to do, then stayed because I couldn’t imagine anything else.

Now I could.

Then I thought about Nick and knew I had to talk to him.

I didn’t call that night. I sent him an email instead, only one line:

I need to talk to you ASAP.

The next day at work, I called him from the phone at my desk.

“Hey,” he said. “I got your email. What’s going on?”

“He left.”

His voice lifted. “Wait, really? What happened?”

“There’s something else,” I said.

“He isn’t my boyfriend. He’s my husband. But I’m not letting him come back.”

Silence.

“And I’m not twenty-two. I’m twenty-eight.”

I swallowed.

The silence lasted so long I thought the call had dropped.

When he finally spoke, the hope had disappeared from his voice.

“You’re married.”

“Yes.”

“This whole time?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“I have to go,” he said.

The line went dead.

I sat there for a long time after the call ended. I had let him fall in love with someone who wasn’t exactly me. Some of what I’d told him was true. Some of it wasn’t. 

And as awful as I felt, part of me was relieved. The truth was finally out, and there was nothing left to hide.

A few hours later, while I was flipping through a bound thesis that needed an entry in the catalog, the familiar “uh-oh” came through the speakers.

My heart jumped.

“Can you talk?” he typed.

I picked up the phone and called him.

“I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out why it matters,” he said without saying hello. “The age thing and the married thing. They’re two different things.”

I waited.

“Your age doesn’t matter. I feel like I know you. I’ve known you for months. That part is real.”

“And the married part?”

“That one I have to think about.”

He paused.

“But I’m going to break up with her. I should’ve done it a long time ago anyway.”

“Because of me?”

“No. I’m not doing it because of you. You just made me admit it had been over for a long time.”

After we hung up, I felt awful about his girlfriend. But I was hopeful too, and I hadn’t let myself feel that before. 

Nick knew the truth now. All of it. And he was still there.

For months, I had believed we would never exist anywhere beyond computer screens and telephone lines. Now, for the first time, meeting him no longer felt impossible.

This wasn’t the end of what had happened between us.

It was the beginning.

***

The divorce was quick. We had no children, no property, nothing complicated to divide. I waited until it was final before agreeing to meet Nick.

He flew into Atlanta, and I drove to his hotel. I remember riding the escalator up to the lobby, nervous enough that I could feel my heart pounding. 

He was sitting in an oversized velvet chair near the front desk. When he saw me, he stood up and smiled. I recognized the same crooked smile I had seen months earlier when his photograph arrived by email.

The person behind the keyboard was finally standing in front of me.

On Christmas night, I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life. I was twenty-nine, flying to Newark, New Jersey, a place I had never imagined visiting.

Nick was waiting at the gate.

I walked toward him without knowing where any of it would lead. For the first time, uncertainty didn’t frighten me.

It felt like possibility.