Chapter 1

Life’s a Beach

So that was this. That failure that hung on her like a purse, always threatening to fall off her sloped shoulders, this is where it sets itself down - the signature line of divorce papers.

The details are worked out amicably. He could have asked for half her book earnings, after all, the story was half his, but he didn’t. He asked for half the sell of the house and used it to buy an RV.

Half a Los Angeles Fairfax District house, even a modest one, is enough to live on for a few years when you have no kids and no intention of living in California anymore. April doesn’t have to see Morgan when she goes in to sign off on the end of their marriage. She thinks she’s glad about that, but it feels odd to not discuss this life event with the man she has shared a life with.

Several friends offer to go with her to the law office but she elects to go alone at 10am and schedules an appointment with her therapist at 11:30. This gives her just enough time to treat herself to a fancy coffee and cheese danish between the two appointments.

“I’m not surprised, no. I think a nomadic life suits him.” April answers her thera- pist’s question about Morgan’s plans to live out of his RV in the mountains of Colorado.

She’s a little annoyed at the line of questioning about her hus...her ex-husband. Tripping over that new distinction reminds April of how long it took her post-wedding to refer to Morgan as her husband without the title feeling so odd in her mouth.

Now, fourteen years of practice have her so trained to say “husband” that it rolls off her tongue before her brain has inserted the “ex”.

Her therapist, Dr. Novacheck, is staring at her expectantly and April is aware that she’s let her mind wander again.

Dr. N has her head tilted slightly to the right and is wearing a patient expression like a well-rehearsed actor.

“So...” April stalls as she tries to grasp a single word that might have left the doc- tor’s mouth in the last thirty seconds and stayed lingering somewhere in the air of the small office. She comes up with nothing. “Sorry, I got sidetracked there.”

“You don’t have to apologize...”

April interrupts, “I know. Sorry.”

Shoot. April is not supposed to apologize. But if she does apologize, she’s not supposed to apologize for apologizing.

They’ve had this same discussion multiple times. Therapy is April’s time and she’s not supposed to apologize during her time. But...if therapy really is April’s time, shouldn’t she be able to be sorry without being made to feel wrong for apologizing. Maybe she enjoys apologizing, or at least enjoys it more than wasting time feeling sorry for apologizing.

April’s not exactly sure how people are supposed to feel about their therapists. Of course, she’s also not sure how she’s supposed to feel about divorce. Maybe the right therapist helps people understand how they are supposed to feel about their therapists and their divorces - not the divorces of the therapists but the divorces of the patients.

Shoot. Again.

Dr. Novacheck is blinking at April, clearly waiting for an answer to a question April didn’t hear. April blinks back.

Therapy is actually working, just not at all in the way April thought it would. She thought she’d have these moments of release like little toy boats of emotion that finally cast off to parts unknown on the gentle breeze of a sigh. She thought she’d experience a peaceful sort of closure while watching these heavy feel- ings sail off into the sunset.

Instead, April’s little emotion boats seem to be moored in her shallow waters. Counseling has felt like exhausting efforts to create a breeze for her anger and pain to sail away on. Talking non-stop, blowing out hot air from her lungs until she’s mentally hyper-ventilating hasn’t moved these these little hell boats of feelings one inch.

But counseling is working, because April is tired of thinking about Morgan and an- alyzing their failed marriage. She’s sick of “sitting in her emotions” like Dr. N has suggested adnosium. She’s so annoyed by her own voice talking endlessly, not just in therapy but in her own head, that even if her emotions don’t wish to sail into the sunset, she’s ready to jump in the water and swim as far away from this washed up mess of a mental state as she can get.

It reminds her of a story her dad told her about smoking. Her grandfather found a pack of cigarettes in her dad’s car when her father was fifteen. Grandpa Jim was a smoker himself and seemed pretty cool about the find. He offered to smoke a cigarette with his son. It felt like a right of passage for April’s dad, until Grandpa Jim suggested another cigarette after the first, and then another and another. They smoked until April’s dad wretched in the bushes behind their house. He was sick for three days. Never touched a cigarette again in his life. Even the smell of one sets off his stomach to this day.

April has overdosed on analyzing her emotions since her husband announced that he wanted out of their marriage. She’s ready to take her chances swimming into the sunset rather than hanging out on this dock of self-pity any longer.

She looks at the clock on the wall behind Dr. Novacheck’s head. Thirty-two more minutes in this session. April isn’t sure she can make it.

“So it sounds like you and Morgan have had very different reactions to the divorce.”

Yeah, no shoot. He wants it and April does not.

By the way, April is trying to cuss less in therapy so she tries to think about cussing less in therapy because she can’t tell for sure, but Dr. N might be able to read her thoughts. So she’s replacing the thought “shit” with the thought “shoot”, but the phrase “no shoot” doesn’t make sense and now she’s further annoyed by therapy. Because, isn’t that just another sign that Dr. N is a shitty therapist? Like, if a therapist can’t even create a safe space to think “shit”... and, honestly, can therapists who don’t cuss even be trusted?

April glances at the clock again. Well, that line of thought only took up two minutes.

“More than that,” continues Novacheck, “He has moved on to a completely different lifestyle than the one you shared for fourteen years and you...have been trying to figure out how to hold on to that lifestyle.” The doctor says, “hold on” as though it’s a bad thing, but she’s the one who keeps April focused on the past. Yeah, definitely a shitty therapist. So why does April still care what she thinks?

“Can we talk about something else?” April asks.

“Sure,” says Novacheck with forced cheer. “What would you like to talk about?”

“Anything.”

“Ok. How is writing?”

“Ok, maybe not ‘anything’,” April laughs nervously.

Novacheck smiles politely but is clearly not amused. “So if you’re not writing, are you looking for other work?”

Twenty minutes and a ten minute “bathroom break” (during which April spent part of her counseling session hiding in a stall, checking social media) later, April takes a deep breath of fresh ocean air just outside the front door of her therapist’s office. She knows she won’t be coming back here. Of course, April didn’t tell Dr. N that. Con- frontation is absolutely not April’s thing and if Dr. Novacheck was a good therapist, she would have cured April of that by now.

Instead, April will just cancel her next therapy appointment by leaving a message after hours and then she will fail to reschedule.

She doesn’t need to spend $300 dollars an hour, to have someone remind her that she needs to find employment if she wants to be able to last much longer in Los Angeles. As it is, she’s burned through five figures in the three months since Morgan announced he wanted a divorce.

Divorce lawyers, house stagers, estate sellers, realtors, a therapist twice a week, and...parking tickets. April can see one tucked under her windshield wiper as she approaches her car parked on Ocean Park Ave. It’s a joke that they named the street Ocean Park because they don’t really want you to park there. This is her fourth ticket in two months, two of them came in one afternoon.

She doesn’t even bother to wonder what she did wrong to deserve it. It’s just the straw that lands on the mound of other straws that have piled up since the camel broke it’s back several weeks ago.

There’s a weird freedom in being broken. There’s so much fear about the final straw but once you’re broken, what is there to fear anymore?

For months, April has been crawling through life. The plus side is that she’s immune to new feelings of pain or frustration. Each new problem is like adding a dollar to a mountain of debt.

She walks past her car and her parking ticket and heads West toward the ocean.

Why doesn’t she do this more? She lives in L freaking A. Why doesn’t she go to the beach more? Why hasn’t she learned to surf? Why doesn’t she have a tan and sand calves (those muscular calves you get from walking in deep sand)?

Maybe Novacheck is on to something. Maybe April is hanging on to a life that Morgan easily let go of like she tried to hang on to a marriage that he’d already let go of. Maybe she can reinvent, or rediscover herself too.

She pauses for a minute at a car parked just off the beach. It has a ticket on the windshield too, so she feels a kinship. She looks at the reflection of the woman in the passenger side window. She sees chin length brown hair, the hint of a double chin that she’s always explained away as a bulky throat muscle built up from public speaking events, circles under the eyes that are mostly hidden by makeup, red cheeks sensitive to the ocean breeze, narrow green eyes that will never be wide-eyed again.

April never struggled with her body image before, never hated what she saw in the mirror. She always felt lucky to like herself for the most part. And marriage had sort of given her a suit of armor in LA. She didn’t have to care what men thought of her looks compared to all the beautiful people of Hollywood.

A tap from the other side of the car window makes her jump. A man is sitting in the driver’s seat wondering why the hell the weird woman with the bulky throat muscle is staring into his car.

April hadn’t even seen him. She’s so busy staring at her own image, some dude is right in front of her and she doesn’t notice. There’s a lot she hasn’t seen coming lately. There’s a metaphor here somewhere, but April’s brain is too tired to phrase it correctly.

“Sorry,” she says to the guy in the car. “You have a ticket,” April points to his windshield as she walks away.

It’s hard to know who you are as a single after fourteen years as a couple. It’s hard to remember what you are when you don’t have to compromise anymore.

Just the other day, April stopped by the store for some milk and suddenly had the epiphany that she prefers two percent to nonfat. She tried to remember the last time she bought percent milk. Maybe when she was thirty, before Morgan had moved in. Maybe she was at the convenience store by her old house in Van Nuys. Could she have known then that that half gallon would be the last two percent milk she’d buy for more than a decade?

And what, exactly, does it mean that she “compromised” by just not drinking the milk she wanted for fourteen years? Did she give too much? Did she lose herself? Or did she just choose to go with a healthier dairy product?

Maybe the philosophical implications of dairy choice is the kind of thing you could discuss with the right therapist.

April stands on the boardwalk that runs along the edge of the beach. She once met a producer for coffee here. He was one of several who wanted to option her book over the years, but it never worked out and she learned after awhile to not get her hopes up.

Her friend, Carissa, is a screenwriter and she once said, “Hollywood is seventy percent talking about what you will do, twenty-seven percent talking about what you have done and three percent doing the shit you talk about.”

It’s true. Every coffee shop you go into is buzzing with caffeinated chats about what people will do at some future point and what they have done at some past point. Is that what April has been doing for all these years of marriage? Just talking non-stop about the book she wrote over a decade ago and then talking nonstop about the book she will write at some future, as of yet unspecified, time?

So many times over the years, Morgan would bring up the idea of leaving L.A. After all, April wasn’t really writing and even if she was, she could do it from anywhere.

Morgan went from job to job and was pretty good at them all but never loved any of them. Most of their income came from some lucky real estate investments paid for by royalties and April’s monthly appearances at events around the country. She’d give a speech, answer a few questions and sign books. Morgan was good at interview prep and pep talks. April was good at performing. After awhile, there was no need for prep or pep. All the questions were the same. The answers were the same. April didn’t even get nervous anymore.

Her “show” was like a TED talk without the prestige. Crowds of mostly women would come for the motivation to “hang in there” until “the real thing comes along”.

The truth is, April just happened to arrive at the zeitgeist before anyone else. She blogged about the stories of being single in a city of millions and then she met Morgan and the blog turned into a love story that turned into a book deal. Her readers followed her when she was lost, laughed at her foibles, commiserated with her on the insanity of dating at the start of the online dating age. And then they followed her down the aisle and into the months of her early marriage. The fact that she found love gave hope to those that were still waiting.

In the early days of their marriage, after the book was first published, Morgan would travel with April to all these events and shyly pop onstage at the end to thunderous applause as he kissed his wife. They held hands as they exited the stage.

At some point, that stopped. April can’t even pinpoint when that happened. No decision was made or, at least, not one that she was privy to. Morgan just stopped traveling with her.

Now those days of book signings and events like a fraud. A motivational speaker talking about love and marriage? April is a divorced forty-four year old who just hid in a bathroom to avoid therapy, needs to find a job, and is standing at the edge of the beach (unwilling to walk in the sand because it’s a lot of trouble to get sand off between the toes) and can’t make herself face the parking ticket on her car.

Why didn’t she listen when Morgan talked about leaving LA? Why didn’t she believe him when he said he wanted out? Why is she so determined to stay here now? And does she have the cash to buy an ice cream sandwich from the guy with the cart on the corner?

She digs in her purse. Bingo! One crumpled dollar bill and four quarters later, she’s suddenly remembering that cheese danish she had earlier as she bites into the ice cream sandwich. So much for her “one treat a day” rule.

Whatever. It’s not everyday you get a divorce. April tries to subtly undo the top button of her pants to make room in her midsection for the ice cream. She’s a new woman now. She can do whatever the hell she wants. She can reinvent herself. She slips her flats off and steps barefoot onto the sand.

It’s warm under her feet. It’s really warm. It’s burning. It’s really burning.

You know what? There’s a reason she doesn’t do this shit. There’s a reason she doesn’t sit in traffic for two hours to drive to the beach to get a parking ticket and burn her feet in the sand. There’s a reason she doesn’t buy ice cream sandwiches at the beach that melt all over her hands and crunch with the invasive grains of sand that also rub between her toes in a way that makes her want to vomit.

There’s a reason she doesn’t take advantage of living in Los Angeles. She doesn’t actually like the beach, or standing in lines at clubs, or being promised a film option that never happens, or sitting in traffic.

When she was twenty-two and moved to LA with her fresh degree in journalism, this city was a promise of future excitement and opportunities . But now...what was she here for now?