I pause here because I am having trouble getting the words out of my throat.
“And I squinted hard trying to see Nikki’s face, and even from a block away I could tell she was smiling the whole time and was so very happy, and somehow that was enough for me to officially end apart time and roll the credits of my movie without even confronting Nikki, so I just asked Jake to drive me back to New Jersey, which he did, because he is probably the best brother in the entire world. So I guess I just want Nikki to be happy, even if her happy life doesn’t include me, because I had my chance and I wasn’t a very good husband and Nikki was a great wife, and …”
I have to pause again. I swallow several times.
“And I’m just going to remember that scene as the happy ending of my old life’s movie. Nikki having a snowball fight with her new family. She looked so happy—and her new husband, and her two children …”
I stop talking because no more words will come out. It’s as if the cold air has already frozen my tongue and throat—as if the cold is spreading down into my lungs and is freezing my chest from the inside out.
Tiffany and I stand on the bridge for a long time.
Even though my face is numb, I begin to feel a warmth in my eyes, and suddenly I realize I am sort of crying again. I wipe my eyes and nose with my coat sleeve, and then I am sobbing.
Only when I finish crying does Tiffany finally speak, although she doesn’t talk about Nikki. “I got you a birthday present, but it’s nothing much. And I didn’t wrap it or get you a card or anything, because, well … because I’m your f**ked-up friend who does not buy cards or wrap presents. And I know it’s more than a month late, but anyway …”
She takes off her gloves, undoes a few buttons, and pulls my present from the inside pocket of her coat.
I take it from her hands, a collection of ten or so heavily laminated pages—maybe four by eight inches each and held together by a silver bolt in the top left corner. The cover reads:
SKYWATCHER’S
CLOUD
CHART
An easy to use,
durable identifying chart
for all outdoor enthusiasts
“You were always looking up at clouds when we used to run,” Tiffany says, “so I thought you might like to be able to tell the difference between the shapes.”
With excitement, I rotate the cover upward so I can read the first heavily laminated page. After reading all about the four basic cloud shapes—stratus, nimbus, cumulus, and cirrus—after looking at all the beautiful pictures documenting the different variations of the four groups, somehow Tiffany and I end up lying on our backs in the middle of the exact soccer field I used to play on when I was a kid. We look up at the sky, and it’s a sheet of winter gray, but Tiffany says maybe if we wait long enough, a shape will break free, and we will be able to identify the single cloud using my new Skywatcher’s Cloud Chart. We lie there on the frozen ground for a very long time, waiting, but all we see up in the sky is the solid gray blanket, which my new cloud chart identifies as a nimbostratus—“a gray cloud mass from which widespread and continuous rain or snow falls.”
After a time, Tiffany’s head ends up on my chest, and my arm ends up around her shoulders so that I am pulling her body close to mine. We shiver together alone on the field for what seems like hours. When it begins to snow, the flakes fall huge and fast. Almost immediately the field turns white, and this is when Tiffany whispers the strangest thing. She says, “I need you, Pat Peoples; I need you so f**king bad,” and then she begins to cry hot tears onto my skin as she kisses my neck softly and sniffles.
It is a strange thing for her to say, so far removed from a regular woman’s “I love you,” and yet probably more true. It feels good to hold Tiffany close to me, and I remember what my mother said back when I tried to get rid of my friend by asking her to go to the diner with me. Mom said, “You need friends, Pat. Everybody does.”
I also remember that Tiffany lied to me for many weeks; I remember the awful story Ronnie told me about Tiffany’s dismissal from work and what she admitted to in her most recent letter; I remember just how bizarre my friendship with Tiffany has been—but then I remember that no one else but Tiffany could really even come close to understanding how I feel after losing Nikki forever. I remember that apart time is finally over, and while Nikki is gone for good, I still have a woman in my arms who has suffered greatly and desperately needs to believe once again that she is beautiful. In my arms is a woman who has given me a Skywatcher’s Cloud Chart, a woman who knows all my secrets, a woman who knows just how messed up my mind is, how many pills I’m on, and yet she allows me to hold her anyway. There’s something honest about all of this, and I cannot imagine any other woman lying in the middle of a frozen soccer field with me—in the middle of a snowstorm even—impossibly hoping to see a single cloud break free of a nimbostratus.
Nikki would not have done this for me, not even on her best day.
So I pull Tiffany a little closer, kiss the hard spot between her perfectly plucked eyebrows, and after a deep breath, I say, “I think I need you too.”