Going Home Again by Dennis Bock

She looked up at me. “I guess that’s surprising to you.”
    “It is, a bit,” I said.
    She leaned forward and kissed me, and in a flash of heat the greyness inside me disappeared.
    Every fiber in my body pounded with hope for the future. Feeling my spirits lift, I touched her cheek. She didn’t stop my hands when I tried to open her shirt and jeans. We made love on the floor beside that couch I’d been sleeping on, where I’d dreamed of her, and thenI lifted her into my arms and carried her into her bedroom and made love to her again. My heart filled with joy. I had thought about making love to Holly hundreds of times, what she would look like naked, what we would do together, if she would do certain things that I asked her, but my fantasies were nothing compared with the perfect intimacy we felt together.
    In the middle of the night she left the bed. Sleeping lightly, I reached over and found her side was empty. I heard the bathroom door close. A minute later the toilet flushed, but she didn’t come back.
    “Are you okay?” I said, standing outside the bathroom door feeling confused and tired but still exhilarated. What we’d just done had solved everything, I thought. Clarified everything. Put everything else behind us. What we’d shared was natural and perfect and beautiful. When I’d held her in my arms, I knew nothing better had ever happened in my life, yet now I felt worried and full of regret. I pushed the door open. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, still naked, holding her hands to her face.
    “What’s the matter?” I said.
    “I don’t know. I just don’t know what’s happening to me.”
    Holly took me back into her bed the following night. Trembling with excitement, we made love with even more intensity than we had the evening before. But afterward the same melancholy took hold. She becamedistant, worried, then apologetic. It wasn’t as bad and didn’t last as long this time. Still, it was terrible to watch. She was in pain, and I didn’t know how to fix it. I couldn’t understand how something as great as what we did and felt together could cause her to roll back into herself like this.
    The fear and depression that overtook her after we made love seemed to diminish as time went on. I thought she was beating whatever it was that plagued her. Then one night I woke up in the dark, and again I was alone in bed. The covers were torn up, her pillow on the floor. She was in the living room sitting in front of the turntable wearing a pair of headphones. The room was completely dark but for the pale blue glow of the stereo lights playing on the side of her face, her head bobbing slightly to something I couldn’t hear. I wondered then what it must have felt like to be loved as deeply as she had loved Miles.
    It happened again the next night, and then the night after that. It became a regular occurrence, a ghostly ritual. I’d wake up and feel the empty space beside me. I’d stand in the bedroom doorway and watch her listening to music in the dark. Finally I lost count of how many times I saw this. I never interrupted her. I knew she was with him, thinking of him, trying to bring him back. In the morning it was always the Waterboys record sitting on the turntable, the one we’d been listening to the night Miles died. He was still here in that apartment with us. It took finding Holly out there every night for me to really understand that.
    •  •  •
    That we were still together, in some fashion, more than a year after his death, and possibly had a shot at being happy and sharing a life—wasn’t that hopeful, and even what he might have wanted? Nothing we did could be ugly or disrespectful. We were the two people he loved most. I didn’t think he’d want to take the chance of happiness away from us. It took a few months, but eventually we were able to lie in bed together after making love and talk about ourselves as a couple without feeling the world was about to crash down on