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Story Notes:
I still don't own anything.
Author's Chapter Notes:

I know it's confusing; I know the tenses shift; I know the timeline jumps around like crazy and you might not know when a certain thing happened; and I certainly know that some of you won't like the way this story is told, but if you think of each little snippet as its own story and one more piece of the puzzle, maybe that will help.

Thanks so much to Too Late Kev for her fantastic (and tireless) beta job and for letting me steal bits and pieces of her nightmares (sort of without asking, hope that's okay).

And thanks to you all for reading!

 

Puzzled.

That was how he felt. How could something that looked so simple have turned out so complicated?

All the right pieces were there. They should have come together so easily. The picture always looks perfect on the box when you start the puzzle, but then you open the box and see everything jumbled up and you think it will be an impossible task to sort it into meaning. Edges here. Blue water here. Mountains. Wildflowers here. And over here some other things that don’t fit in any category. Five thousand pieces of confusion that may never make any sense.

---

“Goodbye,” he says softly with his fingertips still woven in the ends of her curls. The night is cool and moist with the remnants of a summer shower.

She looks up at him for a moment and in the dimmed light from the porch lamp behind them he wonders if he can make out a frown, but it’s been too long since he was able to read her expression clearly even in the searing light of noon, and now her eyes just look blank.

With another sigh he backs away slowly, holding his breath as he turns to open his car door.

“Call me when you get settled?”

It’s not enough and he feels like marching right back to her to tell her so. That’s the kind of thing you say to your grandkids when they’re headed back for their third year of college. It’s not the thing to say now.

Instead he nods almost imperceptibly. And then shuts the door behind him being careful not to do it too hard because he doesn’t want her to think he’s slamming it. Then he starts the engine and shifts into drive.

Twenty minutes later he’s on the freeway already multiple miles away. The darkness of the lonely road engulfing him, he lets the tears drift down his face and doesn’t even bother to wipe them away.

---

Piece no. 718: the view of their house from across the street.

Out that window, where everyone else sees the ocean, he sees a patch of green lawn in front of a little yellow house with white shutters and a porch. The images haunt him wherever he goes. Sometimes he’ll look up in the grocery store and know he just saw her turn the corner into the next aisle, but when he gets there it’s another set of curls on a stranger’s face and that’s when his heart starts beating again and he reminds himself that she couldn’t be here because he is here and all she wants now is to be where he isn’t.

---

Yesterday would have been their five-year anniversary. Five years was less than the time he spent wanting her and yet when they finally had each other they couldn’t even make it three years.

He had tried calling her, but she hadn’t answered. He hung up once. When he called back he left a short message on the machine. He had tried to void his voice of emotion as he wished her well and hoped she was doing great, really great. When he hung up he was certain she would still be able to feel the tension he hadn’t been able to erase.

He had also tried not to get her a gift this year. He wouldn’t send it of course; he’d learned his lesson that first year they were apart. But it was perfect for her and he couldn’t bear the thought of letting someone else buy it as a present for his wife who might love it, but more than that she would love her husband for being so thoughtful. If he couldn’t have that then why should they?

He set it on the top shelf in his hall closet next to the birthday presents he hadn’t been able to resist either. One for Pam and one for another girl whose birthday he would never forget.

---

“It’s called grieving, and it’s totally natural that you should feel this way. It just takes time, Jim. Don’t be so hard on yourself, huh?” Her office was light with a modern feel and funky furniture, but not a reclining couch or a notepad full of diagnoses to be seen. He wondered why he’d come. What could this straight-haired, fashionably dressed woman possibly know about grieving?

“But, I can’t… I don’t think it should be this bad, you know? Not now, I mean, it’s been a year almost.”

“I know,” she replied seriously, still in that too-calm voice of hers. “But think about it. How long did you spend being in love with her?”

“Too long,” He spit the words out bitterly.

“Hey,” she said, her voice still calm, but authoritative.

“What?”

“Was she worth it?”

He paused. He knew his answer, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it out loud.

“Yes.”

“And if you had to do it again knowing that it wouldn’t last would you still let yourself fall in love with her?”

---

It’s the end of another summer and he’s sitting on the beach watching the sun set into the surf. It’s the kind of thing he would do with her if she were here.

Everything is the kind of thing he would do with her if he could only see her again.

---

Piece no. 3,768: the way her forehead would scrunch up in concentration as she sketched his hands.

It had been a favorite thing of theirs for a time. She would help him to get his hand to fall “naturally” but in just a certain way and then he would stay there frozen watching her eyes as she studied him. Talking quietly now and then, they would let the peace of an empty afternoon stretch into evening and when they were done she would show him the record of their time together in the form of particularly well-recorded tendons and in her creations he would see himself as he never had before.

---

His signature was so much broader than hers. You could blame it on handwriting differences between genders, but it’s more than that, he thinks.

“All done there, Mr. Halpert?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess. I, I think so. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

With an indulgent smile on a face full of patronizing sympathy, the man returns, “Now, Mr. Halpert, that’s the question I’m supposed to ask you.”

He nods, storing the words “divorce lawyer” in his memory, labeling them as one more piece to sort into the correct pile. He can’t fathom how this piece will ever fit into their puzzle.

---

Her hair had been short on that day they first met, just barely brushing her shoulders. She’d smiled at him in the elevator first.

“Hi, I’m Jim,” he’d said, hand extended.

“I’m Pam.”

“So you work at Dunder-Mifflin?”

“I’m the receptionist.”

“Oh, cool. It’s my first day.”

“Yeah, well, that explains why you think it’s cool to be a receptionist.”

“Aw, come on, I’ll bet you get to do lots of cool stuff.”

“Right. The endless joys of faxing.”

The elevator door had dinged and with a set of wry smiles they’d stepped out to meet their fate.

---

He spent that first night of being alone (more alone than he’d ever been before, more alone even than he had been before he met her, or in all those longing years before she was his) at a rest stop, sleeping in the driver’s seat from three to six am. He drove until he was too tired to think, wanting to ensure that there would be no waking moments in which to contemplate his current state. When the sun came up in the treetops he started the engine again. Chicago, Omaha, Salt Lake City, he’d drive as far as he had to so long as it would keep the numbness intact.

---

“Jim? It’s me. Um, I don’t know if… well, uh, anyway I just thought you should know that I got a wedding invitation from Angela today. She and Dwight are finally getting married. It’s in April and um, well, it’s addressed to both of us because, you know I guess you probably didn’t have time to tell them before you left, so… yeah. Just thought I should let you know. Okay. Bye.” He kept the message for months even though it was riddled with words that made him cringe every time he heard her say them: “wedding,” “married,” “finally,” “us.”

---

Piece no. 2,643: that time they had gone to the park on a Sunday afternoon and watched all the little kids climbing on the jungle gym.

He had laid his hand over her belly, rubbing his thumb back and forth, trying to grasp that there was a life in there somewhere. Their baby.

She had looked up at him with tears in her eyes and he’d moved his thumb to her cheek to catch them as they slid toward her chin.

“I love you so much.”

“I know. I love you, too.”

“I can’t believe this is really happening.”

“Me neither.”

Their mouths, with echoing smiles, had met for a soft kiss.

---

The baby lived four months. They named her Faith. She took theirs with her.

---

He’s not that old, even though after everything that has happened he feels like he’s middle-aged. But in reality, he’s still in his thirties for a few more years, in fact.

He sits. One hand cups his chin, keeping his head upright. The other hand roams across the table he bought second hand. With his fingers he traces connections between the knots and the cracks and the gouges in the wood. Distressed was what they called it, and the style had seemed fitting.

He gazes out the window at the gray storm clouds on the horizon. He thinks he might cancel that blind date his coworker arranged for him to go on tomorrow. It’s still too soon and also he has a lot of things to catch up on this weekend, and besides that, he’s not sure he’s willing to inflict himself on some poor, unsuspecting woman just yet. And besides all that, he’s still in love with his ex.

---

“Yes.”

“So, you see, don’t you? What I’m getting at? Even though it hurts, isn’t it that same hurt that made the happy time you had together so wonderful?” The office is much too white. The furniture too slick. He actually thinks he might have preferred a couch of some sort.

“I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.”

“Jim, wait. I know it hurts to talk about it, but I think you really need to…”

He shut the door behind him and practically sprinted to his car. Speeding all the way back to his apartment and then skipping every other stair, he managed to make it inside before succumbing to the sobs.

---

He didn’t know how to keep Pam from crying in the middle of the night. Especially when every time he tried to hold her she pushed his arms away, or got up to go sit in the rocking chair in the baby’s room, leaving him with his own private grief.

---

Piece no. 1,084: the ebb and flow of pranking.

He hadn’t meant to make it so, but over time he found he could measure the status of their relationship by the pranks they pulled on their old coworkers and their new in-laws. When there were a lot of pranks or a particularly elaborate one, they were doing well. When he couldn’t even get Pam to help him plan any, he knew there was something wrong.

One time they’d invited the whole office over to their house and left suspicious hints of their secret assassin alter egos for Dwight to find. The highlight of the night had been when Michael had discovered Dwight and Andy digging up a patch of grass in the backyard. Dwight had claimed he was looking for his watch. Andy was adamant about the fact that Dwight had told him there were dead bodies buried beneath the oak tree.

For months they would see the bare patch in their lawn and look at each other with sly smiles.

---

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

He nodded, looking down into Angela’s eyes and catching the sincerity there.

Across the room from him Pam was surrounded by her family. Her back was turned to him, but he could tell by the way her shoulders were shaking that she was crying again. As her mom’s arms wrapped around her shoulders Jim wished he could be the one holding her, but when he had tried it earlier she had just stood there limply, and then walked away muttering something about just leaving her alone in a low voice that hadn’t sounded like hers.

Angela gave him a small smile and tapped his shoulder affectionately. Then Dwight was hugging him and Jim was so stunned and drained at that point that he just let it happen.

He wasn’t sure he had ever seen Pam wear black before this week.

---

Here the sun would come out now and again to warm the sand even in December. Here the stars appeared farther because the sky appeared bigger with only water to greet it on one side. Here the clouds blew in from the west in gusts and puffs and drizzles. Here he settled to forget everything that had come before. Here he was no closer to finishing the puzzle.

---

The fluorescent lights overhead only illuminate that he’s alone. It’s past ten and he’s forgotten how to stand up. He looks around the silent office and thinks about another time that he was here this late. But that time the lights had been dimmed, desk lamps showing only the glow of her skin and the sheen off her bright blue dress. She’d been so soft that day. The first time he’d allowed himself to touch her like that.

Looking back at it now, that night had been so simple. He’d told her because he had to. She’d responded because she needed to. For one quick moment they’d damned all the consequences and surrendered to their impulses. And that one quick moment had been perfect.

And then she’d pushed him back a step, back into the darkness. And like a coward he had let her one little push propel him farther and farther away. He’d been too broken to do otherwise.

With a snap of understanding he can see that she’s doing it again. It’s taking more force this time to cast him off from her, but she’s pushing, and because he loves her and all he has ever wanted was for her to be happy, he has no idea how to get her to stop.

---

When the phone connected she didn’t say anything and he thought maybe he should have ignored her and not called, even though she’d asked him to and it was the first time in the weeks since that night that he’d actually felt “settled” enough to do it.

“Hi,” he said finally, giving up on hearing from her first.

“Hey.”

“I’m sorry, is it late there?”

“No, I haven’t even eaten dinner yet.”

“Oh.”

“So…what time is it there?” The words stung with memories of another reunion via phone call, but this time they weren’t saying hello again. This time they were saying goodbye.

“Um, it’s a little after five.”

“Oh, right, yeah.”

“So do you like California?”

“Um, I don’t really know yet. I guess, I think so. I hope so.”

“Uh huh.”

“Pam?” His voice was too intense and he knew it, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Yeah?” From across a continent he could still hear the way her voice trembled on the word.

“I… I still love you.”

“Yeah…”

For a long time they were quiet—he kept thinking she was about to say something else and he didn’t want to interrupt just in case. Then finally she did say something.

“I have to go.”

“Right, yeah. Me too. Um, but do you think, I mean, could I call you again sometime soon?”

“Um, I, I don’t know. I think maybe, actually, I really do have to go. But I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”

“Oh, okay.” The slightly staticky noise disappeared before he had time to finish. “Bye,” he whispered.

---

Piece no. 4,435: the smell of her chocolate chip cookies baking in the middle of the night.

She would never tell him what was in the recipe, which, as he argued, was just silly because she really shouldn’t have to get up at two in the morning and make herself chocolate chip cookies just because she was craving them and she couldn’t stay asleep. If she would only tell him he could make her a batch every night before they went to bed and then they wouldn’t have this problem.

Or she could freeze a big batch of dough for him to thaw out and bake while she kept her swollen feet elevated on the couch.

But there was something in the baking process, she claimed, that could calm her down after even the most horrible of nightmares. She had them frequently these days. Sometimes about ridiculous things like giving birth to a monster or being at the hospital and then having the baby suddenly disappear. Sometimes about vague things like catastrophic explosions or men with hoods and guns. And sometimes about things that didn’t sound scary at all when she tried to explain them to him but that would still leave her clammy half an hour later.

It was funny how being pregnant had revived her interest in cooking. He knew because she’d told him that as a teenager she’d loved cooking with her grandmother, but since they’d been married they had always traded off on the domestic duties, including cooking. So it was strange now to come home to a full meal every night. Not that he was complaining, of course. He just wanted her to know that she didn’t have to do it all on her own, even if she was spending most of her days at home now, and he was putting in as much overtime as possible and saving up his vacation days for when the baby arrived.

---

There was one time right after it happened that she’d let him hold her. The night after the funeral while her mom was out buying groceries he’d come into their room to find her curled in a ball in the middle of their bed. Silently he’d shed his shoes and slipped beneath the sheets, pulling her into him and keeping her tightly there as the sobs ripped through them both.

---

“Jim? It’s Pam. I know it’s been a long time. I’m sorry, I meant to call you sooner. I, I hope you had a good Christmas. Um, well, bye.”

For the umpteenth time as he dialed her number over and over he cursed his thoughtlessness for leaving his cell phone in his apartment instead of taking it with him when he went to play basketball at the park down the street.

Outside in the January twilight, the palm trees dipped and swung in the wind from a rising storm.

He left twenty-six voicemail messages over the next week. She never picked up.

---

Sometimes in the darkness as he’s trying to fall asleep after another endless day, he whispers her name, “Pam.” Then their daughter’s name, “Faith.” Then his own. “Jim.” Reminders that for a precious piece of time he’d had his own perfect family.

---

On the second night of being alone after being with her he’d stopped at a cheap motel. He couldn’t remember the name of the city now, or even which state it had been in. But he couldn’t forget the feel of the unfamiliar sheets or the flash of the muted television that he left on all night long so that it would never get too dark.

And he can remember how in the morning he’d had breakfast, his first meal in nearly two days. He ordered pancakes and orange juice at the counter of a restaurant with shabby bar stools and stocky men laughing with each other over their coffee.

He ate two plates of pancakes dripping with super-sweet syrup.

Then twenty minutes later he pulled off the highway and threw it all up in a corn field.

---

“I think I want a divorce.” He let the word linger in the air, afraid to touch it for fear it would become real.

“Why?” he asked.

“I just can’t do this anymore.”

“Please, Pam. Please, don’t. Just tell me what to do. I’ll do anything, just...don't...”

“I… I can’t. I’m so sorry.”

“Please,” it was all he could manage to get out from beneath the lump in his throat.

---

One winter when they had only been married for a few months they took a trip to the Poconos. And from the oversized chair next to the window they had sat curled up in each other to watch the snow fall down in graceful swirls of flakes. They’d talked about the rest of their lives together and how happy they were to have found each other finally.

None of their plans that day had included the minute he was currently living as the sun came up and he drove in to work along a now-familiar route that took him along the coastline for a few miles.

This moment when he was hoping only to make it through the days until Christmas when he could go home to be with his parents and his sister and her husband and kids. When he could be at least near Pam since he couldn’t be with her.

This moment when he was thinking about how on Christmas Eve he would take Faith’s birthday present to the cemetery and then pretend not to notice when his dad went out later that night and snuck it back to their house to donate to another little girl for her Christmas.

This moment when he suppressed the tears because it had been almost six years since that trip to the Poconos and he wouldn’t let himself walk into work with puffy, tell-tale eyes.

---

In time, the tears came less and less. Not because he was getting better, but simply because he had reached a point where like those graphs he had learned about in high school algebra he was stretching further and further out to infinity, though he would never quite touch the x-axis. He had resigned himself to his new life without her. Not accepted, but resigned. Resigned he could manage. Perhaps one day it wouldn’t matter that acceptance could never be reached. At some point the distance between himself and the x-axis would have to become so small that it could be called unimportant even if it never really went away. That was what he told himself.

---

He kept going home for Christmas just to be close to her. Every year he would borrow his dad’s old pickup truck and drive the same route. He left from his parents house; passed Dunder Mifflin; drove through their old neighborhood, pausing only for a minute in front of what he still thought of as their little yellow house even though it had now been painted a neutral green; then to the cemetery; and last he would make the long drive to her parent’s house where he would inch his way past it, hoping to glimpse her familiar movements as shadows against her mother’s antique curtains.

One year her parent’s house had been dark by the time he reached it, and he’d parked the car across the street and just sat there with the heater running for a long time. It didn’t matter if she was there or not. He just needed to imagine that she could be.

---

On their seven-year anniversary he forgot to buy her a present. And when he realized what he’d done he thought seriously about calling her to apologize.

---

Piece no: 2,566: not wearing a ring.

Six months after arriving in California he forced himself to stop wearing his wedding ring. He kept it in a box in his dresser. Sometimes he put it on just to make sure it would still fit. One time he slept with it on for a few nights in a row. Then he put it back in the box.

He walked down the hallway to his kitchen, made himself a sandwich, and then called that girl he’d met at a mutual friend’s dinner party a few nights earlier.

They went out twice. But, as he told his sister when she called to ask how it was going, “she just wasn’t his type.”

---

Whenever he returned to Monterey after a Christmas in Scranton it struck him again how few trees there were here. The snow he didn’t miss too much. But the trees had always been one of those things that as a kid he just thought of as normal until he saw pictures of other scenery and remembered that not all places were the same.

January was the hardest month, of course, but he’d accepted that long ago, and as he neared his apartment coming home from the airport he braced himself for another long year of storing up the pieces.

---

“Jim.”

It’s the shock of hearing her say his name that makes him realize that this isn’t just another dream in which she shows up on his doorstep in that quiet, restless time between dinner and sleep. Behind her the palm trees sway softly and the intermittent noise of traffic drowns the distant sounds of the surf.

“Can I come in?”

“Yes, yes, of course, please.” He stumbles awkwardly on the words and regrets each one as soon as it is out of his mouth. After all these years he still sounds much too eager and the last thing he wants to do is drive her away with his enthusiasm.

But instead of stepping back she walks to his couch and sits down on one side, leaving ample room for him to sit on the other end, which he does.

“What… what are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.”

It had to be a dream. There was no other explanation for this moment. (Yet another moment they hadn’t planned on that snowy day in the Poconos.)

“Jim?” Again it is her voice saying his name that shakes him from his reverie.

“I just can’t believe you’re here.”

“I’m sorry. I should’ve called.”

“No. No, no, no, no. It’s fine. I mean, it’s better than fine. I’m really glad you came. I just still can’t believe that you did.”

She smiles at him shyly and he can’t help but smile back. And then he’s pulling her in for a hug and her eyes are full of tears.

They sit that way for a few minutes, just taking in the feel of each other again after such a long time.

And then she turns her face up to look at him and what he sees in her eyes makes him think for the first time in years that maybe they really could put all those jumbled pieces together somehow. And the thought of it takes his breath away.

She shifts to kiss away the one tear that has begun to slip down his cheek, and then she buries her face against his neck, kissing her way softly from his ear to the collar of his shirt.

“I’m so sorry,” she mumbles against his skin.

“I’m sorry,” he echoes, stunned.

Then he places his hands softly on her face and pulls her lips up to meet his.

They spend the night making love and reassuring each other that this is really happening. Just before dawn they drive to a hill overlooking the beach to watch the sun come up. And when they get back to his apartment and he asks her to make her chocolate chip cookies for breakfast she just smiles and reaches for the mixing bowl sitting on one of the open shelves in his kitchen.

Their kitchen again.




Azlin is the author of 27 other stories.
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