Days of Awe (26 page)

“Iz.” Chris reaches out to touch my shoulder, then thinks twice, pulls his hand back.

“Did you get new glasses?” He's wearing small, black, rectangular frames. They used to be a little rounder, slightly larger.

He pauses for a second, smiles, barely, lifts his hand to the edge of the frames. “I broke mine last weekend playing basketball….Good job noticing.”

That's what I used to say to Hannah when she was little and she made an observation about something, anything—a new box of Kleenex in the bathroom, an ant on the sidewalk.
Good job noticing!
Chris thought it was the most ridiculous thing to say to a child, the most absurd example of overpraising.
Good job swallowing that water,
he would say to her.
Good job having toes.

And Hannah, clever child, not more than three or four, would giggle like crazy and give it back to Chris:
Good job sneezing, Daddy. Good job walking to the refrigerator. Good job having a face!

“Yes, I'm an excellent observer,” I say now, aiming for soul-piercing sarcasm but sounding, even to my own ears, pathetic.

Here's what I expect Chris to say:
It's not what you think. It's not like that. There's nothing between us. It's not what it looked like. Ha-ha-ha, this is all just a crazy misunderstanding!

Here's what he says: “Iz, oh, God. This is hard. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know. Honestly, I don't. I'm sorry. I promise I would tell you if anything ever…if I ever, if things got…whatever. Of course I would tell you.”

He wrings his hands and stares hard at the ground. He looks like a little boy, trying to talk his way out of a jam.
I swear I didn't copy my answers!

“She is our couple's therapist,” I say, my teeth chattering with cold and ache.

“Was. She was our therapist. She's not anymore.” Chris's light hair is a little shaggier than I remember; it fluffs out like feathers in the wind. “She made sure, you know, that we were done with counseling. She was insistent about that.”

“How professional of her.” I look away from Chris, scanning our surroundings. We're standing near a crosswalk, this busy avenue intersecting a leafy neighborhood. A scrap of paper flutters close to my feet. In front of a nearby house, a dog barks. “She's a gem,” I say.

“I…I…I,” he says, still wringing his hands.

“Great,” I say. “That's good to know.”

“Iz.”

I shrug. “It's fine. It's kind of sketchy, to be honest. A little bit in the moral
gray area,
I think. But whatever! Whatevs!” And then I walk away again, getting more practice at leaving than I ever wanted.

I make my way to my car, as panicky and wound up as an overstimulated baby. I can't process the information I've been given. I get into my car and barely make it home before I power down into a three-hour nap.

When the doorbell rings, hours later, I'm still on the couch, but I'm awake. Through the living room window, I catch a glimpse of Chris on the porch and sink down as low as I can into the cushions.

“Iz!” Chris calls, and knocks. “Izzy, come on!” He rings the doorbell again and then knocks again, loudly.

I introduced Chris to my mother fifteen years ago, at a Greek restaurant. Over stuffed grape leaves and spanakopita, he told her colorful anecdotes of internecine strife at the state DNR office, and she told him a gossipy story about the local celebrity who recently threw a fit in the waiting room of the dermatology clinic where she worked. (
It was Carolyn Stafford, the weekend anchor on channel six, but I'll deny it in a court of law!
)

I could tell she liked Chris, and I was giddy with relief: I knew I was going to marry him. Afterward, when he went to get the car, she said, “Isabel, he's wonderful.”

I nodded and grabbed her arm and whispered, “He would definitely hide us in an attic!”

Helene tilted her head at me and paused for a long moment, and then she said, “Well, let's hope it won't come to that.”

“Isabel,” he calls through the door. “Please let me come in!”

In an hour, I'll get up. I'll brush my hair and my teeth, and I'll check to make sure there's not a splotch of toothpaste or a large coffee stain on the front of my shirt that would make Hannah cringe and say,
Mom, are you even aware that there are mirrors in our house?
I'll get in the car and I'll drive to Katelyn's, where her cheerful mother will greet me at the door.
The girls were terrific,
she'll say.
Delightful!

I'm so glad,
I'll say.
Thank you. Thank you so much,
and Hannah will see me from the other room and smile, recognizing me as her mother.

That will be later. For now I hunch low on the old, forgiving couch. Chris knows I'm here. He might even be able to see the top of my head. He knows this trick.

He still has his key, of course, but it seems that, as a small concession, he's not going to use it.

I reach up behind me and feel blindly for the cord of the window shade and, as carefully as I can, I pull it down. Unfortunately there are three more windows in this room, all of which look out onto the porch, and none is as easily accessible to me at the moment.

“I see you,” Chris says. He's come around to the window. His voice is disconcertingly close, a little tinny and distorted through the glass. “I want to talk to you. I'm sorry, Iz. I don't know what to say. I really am!”

Years ago, when Hannah was about four years old and we were happy, the three of us went for a little hike on a Saturday morning. It was late September, and the world pulled us into it—the explosion of colors in the trees; the sweet, melancholy whiff of autumn. We drove to the Audubon Nature Center and took an easy path through the woods, crunching on the fallen leaves, Hannah skipping ahead, shouting, “AY-kern! AY-kern!” every time she saw one. She was collecting them in her mitten, naming each one as she dropped it in—Mindy, Greg, Kansas City, Sneaky Pete. She still has that acorn collection, twenty or thirty of them lovingly stored in a cookie tin.

Chris held my hand as we walked, and together we gazed upon our daughter with an almost-shameful pride, the thing you secretly harbor but can admit only to the bearer of the other half of your child's DNA:
We made her. Can you believe we made her?
She sang to her acorns, and Chris warmed my hand with his, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with the knowledge that this was a moment to pay attention to: this day, this air, these two people. I felt the perfection of the moment and, inside of it, I felt its demise. I was almost dizzy with it.

“Britney,” Hannah said tenderly, dropping another acorn into the mitten. “You will be delighted to meet your friends.”

“Weird kid,” Chris whispered to me.

We emerged from the wooded area into a clearing, and an expanse of prairie opened up ahead of us, the thick grass mostly faded to a dull brown, a few hearty purple flowers still in bloom. In the distance was a bird tower. We meandered toward it. A wooden staircase wrapped around the inside of the structure. It was a little rickety looking, but Hannah had raced over to it and was already halfway up the first set of stairs. Chris jogged to catch up with her, but I took my time. It was warmer out in the open; the sky was a deep, cloudless blue. By the time I got to the bird tower, Chris and Hannah were already at the top.

“Come up, Mommy!” Hannah called. She waved to me from the narrow observation ledge. Her blond hair blew in her face, and her red jacket reflected the sunlight. “There are
telescopes
!”

“It's gorgeous up here,” Chris called, his hands on Hannah's shoulders. “You can see for miles!”

I shook my head. The steps made me nervous, and I was never a big fan of high places. “I'll stay down here,” I yelled to them.

I didn't want to see for miles. I didn't want to peer into a telescope and spot the highway in the distance, the farms on the periphery, the birds in formation. I wanted to stand at the base of the bird tower and crane my neck toward Chris and Hannah, bathed in sunlight, golden. Love was foolish and inevitable. We were just waiting to be shattered by it. The days were finite, full of awe.

“Iz!” Chris shouts again from the front porch. He taps on the glass. “I'm not leaving until you let me in.”

I sigh and get up stiffly, walk to the front door, unlock it. Chris steps inside and then gazes past me, and a look of surprise passes over his features, as if he doesn't recognize what was once his. He takes off his glasses and cleans them with his T-shirt, puts them back on. His body sags a little.

We stand together in the doorway, and neither of us has a clue. “I have to go pick up Hannah,” I say, even though we both know it's two hours too early. The soft, late-afternoon light casts a homey, orange glow in the living room, a little cosmic taunt.

“I'm sorry,” Chris says, an echo of all the dumb “sorry”s of our marriage:
I forgot the eggs, I used the last of the shampoo, we're out of coffee.

I shrug. “It's okay.” My voice comes out croaky, scratchy from my long nap.

“It's not,” he says.

And it's really not, but maybe eventually it will be.

And so I find myself here again, at another meeting of the Relationships in Transition support group.

And has it been two months since I last laid eyes on Cal Abbott's kind face?

“We'll see each other again soon!” I'd said through the half-open car window in my driveway on that spring day: hopeful, confused, disoriented as a blind puppy. And did he say, in response, “Perhaps we will,” followed by the car's whirring shift into reverse, the automatic thunk of the doors locking?

And did I, very briefly, cyberstalk his ex-wife?

And have I somehow, finally, just barely gotten used to my new living arrangement, the house-sounds in the night I alone must investigate, the broken appliances that I have to fix by myself or (more likely) replace, insane asylum days with Hannah followed by solitary-confinement ones without her? Yes, yes, yes, and no: not really.

I'm a refugee from happiness with nowhere else to go. And also, oh, I want to see him again. I do—even though every time I imagine sitting down beside him on an uncomfortable chair, or standing near him as I load up a paper plate with an embarrassment of tiny brownies, my left eyelid starts to twitch.

“You go without me this time, darling,” my mother said this morning. Her voice sounded gravelly, weary. “It should be your thing, not mine.”

“
Come on,
man,” I said. “This is your fault. You were my dealer. You got me hooked! Hooked on the wacky weed!”

She sighed. “Sweetheart. Are we talking about the same thing?”

“All righty,” Jillian says. She makes a little looping motion with her index finger, like she's letting us know she thinks we're all crazy. But it's an instruction, of course, and so fourteen of us in the basement of the East Side Community Center obediently drag our folding chairs into a perfect circle.

It smells musty and sweet down here, as if ripe late-spring mud were trying to reclaim the building, beginning a slow seep through the walls. Jillian sits down primly and folds her hands on her lap. “Hello again to you all, and a warm welcome back to…” The room is silent. I look around at the vaguely familiar faces, the broad strokes of vulnerability and not-quite-dead optimism brushed across their features, all of our features. What effort it takes some days just to get into your car and drive somewhere. Park. Walk downstairs and find the right room. Not run screaming out the door. “Welcome back to…” Jillian says again, nodding in my direction.

“Oh! You mean me!” They've been coming here every week, I guess, coalescing into a tightly knit group of sufferers, a company of misery. “Isabel Moore.” Sometimes when I say it out loud it doesn't even sound like my name, just its component parts.
Is a bell more what?

“Why don't we go ahead and introduce ourselves, because I think there are a few new faces since you were here last, Isabel!”

Cal, five seats away from me, whispers to a pretty brown-haired fortyish woman in business casual. He smiled politely at me when we walked in, said hello, but that was all; now he's twinkly eyed and chuckling with Liz Claiborne. I'm jealous, although of course I have no right to be. I imagine the two of them, locking eyes empathetically over somebody's tragic tale of marital betrayal, then making out in his blue Prius in the parking lot, his hands caressing her shoulders, fingertips running down her spine. I can practically hear her, humming with pleasure, quiet as the car's engine. In my mind they suddenly, confusingly, become one, Cal's new lady love and his car: compact, attractive, energy efficient. My stomach squeezes like a sponge.

“Say your name and a little bit about yourself,” Jillian says. “Maybe something interesting or important happened since the last time we saw each other? Something challenging, or something that has helped you grow?”

Across from me, Harrison the great big bald man smiles shyly at Lee Ann, the young divorcée, his pinkening face betraying him. Lee Ann fiddles with a clip in her hair and stares at her lap, half smiling, too.

How did I not see until now that this support group is a lonely hearts club? Of course it is! This is why everyone here has changed out of Cheetos-stained T-shirts, why the women are wearing just enough makeup, the men in pants of the nonsweat variety. It's why we put up with Jillian's textbook exhortations, her desperate, hopeful group trust games. It's why we're here. The Relationships in Transition support group is a meat market! Our tenderized hearts are on display for the taking.

“Well, I'm Neil,” the man next to me is saying. “Something interesting in my life is, uh, Rainy, my ‘girlfriend' ”—Neil made air quotes here, his fingers groping in front of him like lobster pincers—“she dumped me for a dude who works at the co-op, I swear to God I think his name might be Kale, and they're going on a friggin' cross-country bike trip. Which is what she and I had been planning. So, yeah.” He laughs bitterly. “That's something interesting.”

Jillian pauses, her eyes darting. She's still so new at this, so green. She shakes her head a little, recalibrating. “All right, Neil. Thank you for sharing.”

“And,” he continues, as if Jillian hadn't interrupted, “I've been thinking, you know…wow. I pretty much sacrificed my whole family for Rainy. My wife and kids, and for what? I…” He presses his fingertips against his eyebrows for a moment and takes a gasping, broken breath. The room is silent. “I'm on my own now,” Neil says. “I really, really fucked…excuse me,
screwed
up.”

Barb, whose husband left her for polyamory and who seemed, at the last meeting, to be percolating a rich and hearty loathing for Neil, tsks sympathetically. Cal gives Neil a consoling nod, then touches his lady friend's arm—just for the briefest second, but I see it. Neil looks around the room and scratches his beard absently,
scritch-scritch,
like it's infested.

“Thank you, Neil,” Jillian says after a pause and nods at me. “Isabel?”

I'm going to waive my turn again. I suppose there is something comforting about being here, but I'm not about to share my deepest secrets with Cal and Ann Taylor and the rest of these sorry strangers, to watch their faces and calculate their judgments or endure their pity. Grief beats its leathery wings under my skin. My friend is gone. That's enough. That's everything! Pass! I pass!

“I…um…”
My best friend died in a car accident just over a year ago. Her husband is in love with a woman with perfect hair who is partly responsible for her death. My mother had a stroke and she's getting old and kind of grouchy and will one day die, and nobody has ever loved me like she does. My daughter, on the other hand, hates me. And my husband is dating our couple's therapist. Former couple's therapist!
I flutter my hand around in front of my face like I'm swatting away an imaginary mosquito. Everything about me is cracked, busted, beyond repair. What part of my life isn't a relationship in transition? “My dishwasher is broken!” I say, quite loudly as heat rises to my face. I inhale and swat away a tear.

The room is silent now, the air swollen with my humiliation. Cal gazes at me as if he's examining a frog under a microscope. Eileen Fisher looks at her feet. Next to me, Neil, who until moments ago held the record for most embarrassing outburst, breathes in and out through his nose with little whistles.

Jillian, poor Jillian. She's just staring into the middle of the circle, her mouth open slightly. If there were a caption underneath her, it would say
DUMBFOUNDED
.

Cal clears his throat. “My toaster has been acting up lately.”

It's raining hard when the meeting finishes, one of those late-spring midwestern thunderstorms that whips up out of nowhere. The sliver of sky visible out of the basement window has gone black, and lightning sparks through the darkness.

Jillian taps the schedule that's posted near the door. “Don't Let Your Diabetes Beat You has this room in ten minutes,” she announces, “so we need to clear off the dessert table quickly.”

“It's the end of Relationships in Transition,” Neil whispers to me, leaning too close and scratching his beard again. “Time for us to
break up
!” He chuckles at his own joke in time with a sudden loud boom of thunder.

The last time I was here, Neil had ditched his family for a twenty-four-year-old hippie chick, and now he's miserable but clear eyed, surveying the wasteland he created. Barb, who practically vibrated with fury two months ago, seems different now, too, maybe sadder but less coiled, as if those vibrations finally shook something loose inside of her. And Harrison and Lee Ann—there's something between them, unlikely but undeniable. It occurs to me that everyone here is changed, whether by time or by friendship: everyone but me.

Another flash of lightning, another low rumble of thunder. Hannah used to climb into bed between us during thunderstorms, trembling. Even after they'd rolled away and all was calm, she'd beg to stay with us.
I'm still scared!
And although our bed was too small for three and she clung to me like a barnacle and Chris wanted her to go back to her own bed, I always agreed, because I knew: just because the skies were clear didn't mean you should let your guard down. Fear is tenacious, ungovernable.

I get up and gather my things, my sweater and purse, then hurry to the back of the room and grab my untouched package of store-bought chocolate-chip cookies from the table and stuff it into my bag. I need to get out of here fast, before I bump into Cal and his girlfriend in the hallway, probably hand in hand, gazing into each other's eyes, murmuring about how lucky they are to have found each other here, amid love's ashes.
I'll pull the car to the door so you don't get wet, sweetie.
Don't be silly, Calvin. We can make a run for it together. I'm not made of sugar. I won't melt!

I'm rushing up to the first-floor exit when the fluorescent lights in the stairwell flicker off and then, a long few seconds later, back on. Barb, a couple of stairs behind me, lets out a startled little yelp. “Oh, my!” Her voice echoes as if we're in a cave.

Rattled, I push through the heavy door at the top of the stairs and into the entryway. Harrison and Lee Ann are already huddled together in the doorway, giggling, his bare, meaty arm slung protectively over her thin shoulders.

The lightning is spectacular, wild, dangerous. Lately I've been trying to vault over my skeptical heart and find traces of Josie in the natural world. Why should the devout be the only ones who get to talk to their dead? So I've been looking. Is her spirit alive anywhere? In the red-tailed hawk who occasionally comes to perch in the low branches of the elm tree in our backyard? In the unexpected rainbow that arced over the green garbage bins in the alley behind Rhodes Avenue a few weeks ago? Of course, the only thing I feel when I silently ask a tulip if it's Josie is ridiculous. The only place I've ever felt even a fleeting glimpse of my dead, dead, dead friend is in the black sky of a thunderstorm, the angry hard pellets of cold rain, the flashes of electricity that could kill you. I know Josie's not actually there, in a storm, but that's what it feels like to miss her, mad and irrational and altered.

I want to be home, right now, in my bed, huddled under the covers. I dig around in my bag for my keys, feel for their reassuring edges.

And that's when I remember that I walked here. “Crap on a cracker.”

“Still worked up about that dishwasher?” Cal is standing behind me. Next to him, Anne Klein adjusts her skirt and gazes out the wide window.

“I just remembered that I…don't have my car.” Two hours ago, it seemed like a good idea to take a nice, mile-long stroll on a warmish night.

“Oh, that's too bad,” Cal says. “Well, see ya around!” His girlfriend looks at him, her eyebrows raised. “Kidding!” he says. “I'm kidding. Isabel, please allow us to drive you home.”
Us.