Away From Everywhere (29 page)

The bus stopped at an orange-and-white North Atlantic Petroleum gas station directly off the highway and at the entrance of the amiable town of Port Blandford. It stopped so abruptly that everyone was jolted forward. An old lady gasped, a kid laughed, and Owen snapped out of another daydream.

As he descended the four steps, limping, the bus driver recommended the French fries in the restaurant attached to the gas bar. He spoke with a smile in his words.“You'll wanna make it an extra large,Chief!”He winked, to promise Owen he'd love those fries, and Owen wanted to be able to care that much about something as simple as French fries. He smiled and let himself wink back. Laughed at himself for winking. But Owen couldn't even be social enough to utter a word to the bus driver and try the fries. He headed straight for his father's old cabin with his head down, squinting from the sun glaring off banks of snow.

All the houses he passed were comfortably modest, with their shrubs wrapped in brown burlap for the winter. Clusters of tall and slender aspens functioned as fences to separate the houses. With the exception of two short roads leading from the highway down into the town, Port Blandford was essentially one long street running parallel to a calming body of water, with nothing but hardy spruce trees beyond the blue bay. The water was a stone's throw from the backyards, and it was calm and spotted with gulls and the white crests of gentle waves.

He didn't want to rush to the cabin, and he didn't know why. Halfway there, he stopped to watch a red squirrel hop along a woman's yard and raid a bird feeder, almost laughing at its quick paranoid movements: it moved its head, not its eyes to watch all angles. He walked on for another few minutes, watching a man in a green-and-black flannel coat chop wood, and loved the crack of it echoing in the cold winter wind.

Long before he was anywhere near his father's place,Owen fished through the change in his pocket and dug out the loose key scattered among pennies and dimes. It was Lillian's copy, and the lettering on a grimy taped label, in faded black ink, read,
Roger's Cabin?
Ever since his father had been admitted to the Waterford Hospital, Lillian had had the only spare key. She'd spend time there whenever she could. Maybe a week a year.

There had been a time when his family spent at least one weekend a month at this cabin, but when he and Alex got to junior high, they'd lost interest in spending the weekends with their family. There were girls now, and parties and video games. The cabin was old, boring, and, relative to those parties and their elating cheap thrills, a form of prison.

He regretted that now, as he approached the old cabin. The swing set was left there to rust in the rain, and grass had grown over their sandbox. It had morphed from a family cabin to one man's getaway. After they'd lost interest in the place,Owen's mother never had any desire to spend time there either, and the cabin was considered his father's retreat, as if it were as silly and childish a retreat as a kid's treehouse. His father spent the weekend there every three or four weeks. He'd take up some big project of his to work on.

Considering the delusional nature of his father's “projects” last going off, Owen was a little scared about what he might find lying around in the cabin, maybe more of those flyers with certain letters underlined to spell out delusional claims. Because Owen was only in his teens when he'd lost his father to schizophrenia, parts of his father's falling ill were still hazy, but he never forgot the day his father's psychiatrist gave him a Polaroid camera and told him to take a picture of his supposed employer next time he saw him. Owen never forgot those three blank Polaroid pictures his father had taken when he
thought
he was seeing and talking to “Mr. James.” There was one of a black,
empty
office chair, one of a wall, and one of a street full of cars but no people. Mr. James was in none of them. Those photos meant it took his father three futile tries to be shocked enough to give up and realize he was sick. His father could describe that man, right down to his mannerisms and how he talked too loudly. Sadder still was the Polaroid picture he took of Owen and Alex the next day, to make sure his children were real. It wasn't too long after that picture that his father went catatonic and never spoke again.

The key felt like a crowbar now, like he was about to break and enter some foreign place. He wanted that feeling to disappear before he stuck the key in the door. The town looked nothing like how he remembered it. It was more of a
town
town when he was a kid, people lived there all year round. Now, all the new cedar A-frame houses, and B&Bs, and all the closed-down convenience stores made it feel like a cabin town, a seasonal place. He liked that though. The seclusion.

He had made it to Port Blandford, but couldn't ignore how many symbols of his past had come along with him. He'd loot from them, make use of them: the lack of distractions here would help with the writing, and he had been sketching out the male protagonist for weeks now. He took out his notepad:

The main character has a limp, like mine, that is a reminder of something horrible from his past. Maybe every time the pain flares up, he remembers a different aspect of that horrible accident. Have him walking into his new town with a duffle bag flung over his shoulder that used to belong to his father, so that he is symbolically carrying some piece of his past along with him. The same sun that is shining down on him is feeding the grass above his lover's grave in his old town. A large premise of the book being this: there is no escaping ourselves, our pasts. So how does one really let go and carry on? Or does one?
Have him meet a single-mother redhead at the ferry terminal. As battered and broken as him, and she has a great, captivating backstory. Maybe her kid falls in the ocean and he dives in and saves him.

WAITING FOR DECEMBER, FOR SOMETHING THAT NEVER COMES

November 26th, 2008,
In my giant bed, a solemn slut beside my husband.

Alex sleeps in the same position every night: on his side, in the fetal position, hugging a pillow as if it were a teddy bear. He looks like a man who spent his childhood lonely. He has tried so hard to build himself a perfect life, an obvious attempt at compensation for his sad childhood, and now I've become the flaw in those plans that might topple everything he has stacked so neatly in place. He at least deserves an ideal adulthood. He put his faith in me, gave me two children, and look what I've done with that trust.

I feel guilty. I feel guilt in my gums and teeth and core. And since guilt is the result of an act of greed, I was greedy to want Owen, even if Alex was neglecting me. The fact I feel guilty must mean I still love Alex. Whatever “love” means. I swear to God we invent words sometimes. Grand concepts with undefinable definitions. I believe there are many forms of love, and they ought to be named individually so we can get it
right. There are men out there who truly love their wives, but burn for another woman. What is that burning called, when it isn't just hormonal? There are women out there who dearly love their husbands, but get swept away by the sweet new man who wanders into her world as a reminder that life is full of other options. What is that temptation called?

The comfort and routine of my and Alex's relationship is a wonderful thing: that bond years together creates is a beautiful thing, and knowing someone so well: when he's going to laugh during a movie, or cry; what he's going to do, right away, when he wakes up. But that kind of love is different than what I have with Owen: enthrallment, and not knowing everything but wanting to, and noticing everything about the person: the way his mouth rises before a laugh, or how truly kind he is. And desire. Desire is again its own form of love.
The fleeting one. The one that gets all the attention in poetry and Hollywood.

I've fucked up. I can't keep them all straight, and share them all with the same man.

I spend every autumn falling apart like this, and in November it peaks. I am a mess, from the first miserable memory of my thieved childhood (his hot breath on my face like an upturned ashtray, his hands sculpting me from an innocent child into a lost cause) to my most recent memory of this desolate adulthood (flipping my husband's pillow to hide the semen stain his brother left there because I was too lazy to do laundry yesterday). You'd think depression/anxiety wouldn't make you lazy, you'd think you'd feel better distracting yourself with mundane chores like laundry.

I know November breaks me down because it was a November when I spent that time with Tommy. Lately, when I think of it all, I blame my parents. Then I feel wrong for that, for the need to place blame. Dad's brother's family had to move to our city
and build a new house because Tommy was expelled from the school in the town where they lived. Fine. That wasn't Dad doing anything wrong. But then, does Tommy sound like the kind of kid you want in your house?With your daughter? And then I feel evil for blaming him, even though I've read that it's normal to misplace blame, intially, as you try and deal with it all, years later. It says so in the book Alex bought me. After he realized he couldn't “fix me” himself.

That “short stay” turned into four months. The longest four months of my life. There may be only sixty seconds in a minute, and seven days in a week, but how we feel that time pass has nothing to do with numbers. It has everything to do with how we experience the world during those moments. We remember our lives through isolated memories, not in a serial manner, not minute by minute.

He was an ugly, zit-faced, sixteen-year-old reject, too much of a bully to be bullied or befriended, and a piece of shit like that doesn't deserve such a prominent role in my life. But he took it anyway. I hate leather because he wore an ugly, black, fake leather jacket, even in the summer. It creaked when he moved and it smelled of shoe polish. The smell of his jacket masked his natural scent of bacon grease and pimples. They'd been staying with us a week before he summoned the nerve to make his way into my room. Coward. Was he just bored? Desperate? Sick?
What makes someone an incestuous sociopath?

It was dark, but I knew it was him because of the sound of that jacket squeaking whenever he bent an arm. I was seven. I knew nothing about the world or how I fit into it, I knew nothing about my body or his. By the time he left my house fifteen weeks later he'd taught me what my body was for.

I couldn't process the horror he put me through. I was too young to know what was happening. I only knew I didn't like it and it hurt. The brain doesn't know what to do with shock
and things we aren't prepared for. All I had to try and piece it together with was his words. He covered my mouth, his big hands almost blocking off my nostrils too, and whispered in my ear, “This is all you are good for. Don't tell anybody or they'll get mad and stop loving you. Nobody really loves you anyway. This is what you are for, so don't complain about it.
Don't tell anyone you've been bad.” I believed him until I was old enough to understand what had happened to me. By then it was too late: I understood love only as something physical, not emotional, and I gave my body up to feel wanted.

So tonight I have to wonder, Is this what happened with me and Owen?Was it love or merely our pasts that made us cross that line months ago on that hot, splintery wharf at the cabin? Do I not know how to feel appreciated and noticed by someone like Owen without whoring myself out to them because of those four months and everything that did to me? Is there more to Owen and me than that?

Sometimes I think this happened because we both found each other at a mutually vulnerable time in our lives – him crawling back from rock bottom, me in the lowest point of my marriage. Since the miscarriage, it's been…hard.

Owen and I just happened to fill each other's empty spaces at a time when we were both feeling empty. In each other lay all the answers to all the questions we had about life, all the proof we needed that life could be electric and electrifying, and then we crossed a line. Is that beautiful or sad? Right or wrong?
The sex happened only to convey all the things words never could. At first, it was never a physical thing. At first the sex was a kinship, it was something spiritual, for lack of a better word. Does that make it necessary, excusable?We just needed to be that close to each other. The intimacy of it, not the cheap thrill of sex.

Those four months with Tommy changed how my life turned
out. Growing up, I mistook horny teenagers fumbling over my bra straps and belt buckles as love. I never even had the confidence to really push myself at university, to apply myself to anything but motherhood. As an adult my identity is still shaky, all I know is that I am a mother of two and a doctor's wife, and now here I am jeopardizing all I know of myself by sleeping with Owen.

In the years since my marriage died, it has been my two little daughters that keep me together, the mightiest of bridges rest only on pillars. And this year, at least until the guilt of it all set in, there was Owen. A new support. But as of this week, any joy he brings me has to contend with all this guilt, and it's a pretty even battle. So it's all just one more tight knot in my belly. He did postpone what I am feeling like tonight as I write this, and because of him I almost got through November without falling apart, but…

BUT!

Of course there is a but. Every time we fall in love with someone new, we fall in love because we feel like there will never be a but with this person. We genuinely feel like things can only get better or at least stay at the same electrifying peak with this person. Sometimes, they say, it stays that way. But this I know: Owen is distant lately and that distance hurts.
That distance puts me on the other end of loneliness, looking in on the world.