He's Gone (30 page)

He did not look for whatever it was he’d lost, after all. He returned to the car instead. But he was pissed about it. Pissed at me. He drove home with that face, that stone-chiseled jaw. We drove in silence. You marry the person you love, and you marry their shadow self, too.

With Desiree now, I try again. It sounds crazy, but I am actually
hoping. Please, please, please, let it be so
. “The two of you—you had some sort of relationship?”

“No, not at all.”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“No, of course not.”

“Flirtation?” I saw it with my own eyes that night.

“Friendliness. He was friendly. He joked. I joked back. He always mentioned his wife. You. Always. I saw you at the party. I don’t know …”

I am silent.

“I mean nothing to him,” she says.

I feel unwell. My head is beginning to swim. Desiree is still trying to explain. She has no idea that I likely understand this better than she does herself.

“Have you ever walked down a street at night and looked into some window?” Desiree says. “Maybe you see a person in there, in a beautiful room? It’s so intriguing, and you don’t even know why exactly. You just want to know more. Maybe you wish you were inside. Maybe you wish that room were yours. That’s all. That’s all it was.”

I shouldn’t have drunk that stuff. It is swirling bitterly in my stomach, and something else is happening: My chest is caving in
again. I can barely get my breath. I try to suck in air, but there is no air.

“Are you okay?” Desiree gets up, heads toward me, and that’s when that damn purse takes the opportunity to rebel from its life of drudgery, or perhaps it’s merely an attempt at handbag suicide. It leaps from its spot, clatters down toward the tiny glass table, causing my drink to slide across its surface and fall to the other side. Everything is falling, crashing down from high ledges. The ice cubes lay there on the carpet; the liquid drips off the side of the table and soaks a dark spot into the rug. The waiter appears immediately—I’d been wrong before if I thought they were off somewhere minding their own business. He has napkins. It’s like that day at the Essential Baking Company with Nathan and the spilled coffee but worse, much worse. The waiter and Desiree are blotting things, but the napkins aren’t up to the job, and now there is Nathan himself, finally, taking my elbow, asking if everything is all right. The napkins are sopping wet with brown liquid, dripping everywhere, and Desiree’s purse contents are spread out for all to see—a bottle of hand sanitizer, a tampon, a pink tube of mascara with the label worn off.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” Nathan says. He looks at me and at Desiree and the mess around us as if he doesn’t know what to think.

“We’re done here,” I say. I grab my own purse and I leave them there. I get the hell out of that place.
He flirts; it doesn’t mean anything. He always talks about his wife. Always
. Desiree Harris is just a woman.

She’s just a woman, and she does not have the answers I need.

Please
, I say to whoever might be listening.
Please, no
.

My stomach churns. I am sick with fear. Because I can feel my fingernails in his skin. Even right then I can feel them digging in.

As they say, the ink was barely dry on Ian’s divorce papers when we got married. It had been nearly four years since we met at that baseball game. He didn’t want an actual wedding, not without his daughters there, and so we went to the courthouse in the city. I wore a cream-colored dress, and he brought me a bouquet of white roses as a surprise. Ian’s old friend, Simon Ash, and his wife, Theresa, stood up for us. It was the first time I’d met them. My family wasn’t there—Abby wasn’t—and it bothered me. But I kept my mouth shut. These were more red flags that I ignored. Maybe they should make those flags in another color.

I didn’t know then what I know now, that emotional rescue is, at the heart of it, a lack of respect. If you’re the one being rescued, it’s a lack of self-respect. If you’re the one rescuing—lack of respect for the other person. You’re demonstrating your belief in your own weakness or in theirs. It’s insulting.

Not that I was with him only because he was rescuing me. I loved him. Oh, I did. My heart ached with it. I didn’t see him clearly, not at all, but I loved him. His eyes got teary, too, when he said his vows.
Forever
, he said. You could believe a day like that could bring a whole new start. He’d been short-tempered and critical since his divorce, but who wouldn’t be? His daughters wouldn’t speak to him. His father had died. I was the equivalent of having all your eggs in one basket. I
was
the basket. No wonder he started imagining that men were interested in me when they weren’t. No wonder he accused me of flirting.
Toby and Renee noticed this about you from the beginning
, he’d say. I’ve never been a flirt. In high school, I blushed when boys talked to me. Ian was just experiencing temporary insanity. In no time, he’d go back to being the man I fell in love with. His behavior made some sense, if you thought about it. The security of marriage
would cure him. Oh, the arrogance in the idea that your love can cure. Good luck with that.

The whole mess—we were clichés, all of us. First, Mark and me. We played out the typical woman-leaves-husband story. In this sordid tale, she tries to leave and he attempts to destroy her for it. During the divorce, he keeps being the asshole he was in the marriage and devises lengthy, expensive legal maneuvers, while she keeps being the victim she was in the marriage and falls apart. There is a separation agreement, a parenting plan, one restraining order, one divorce decree, and a partridge in a pear tree. He gets an apartment and schemes revenge, and she stays in the family home and leans too much on the children for emotional support, ensuring their need for later therapy. He dates bimbos, joins a gym, gets a fresh new look (hair, tattoo), and throws himself into new, weird, short-lived interests (astrology, singles bars, religion). She reads self-help books and tries to be more assertive and marries the first post-husband man she sleeps with. He buys the children expensive gifts he can’t afford but doesn’t show up for birthdays or school events as promised; she struggles with money, gets a puppy, and sews Halloween costumes involving hundreds of sequins, which still does nothing to alleviate her guilt. He disappoints; she hovers. The children (or child, in our case) trudge back and forth and eat two Thanksgiving dinners in one day and vow never to marry unless it is for forever.

And Ian and Mary performed the man-leaves-wife drama. Here, he cheats and hides it, and she finds out but pretends not to know until he finally confesses, after which she tries to meet him at the door in a trench coat with nothing on underneath. He halfheartedly “tries to make his marriage work” while she goes to Nordstrom, maxes out their credit cards, and then sees an attorney secretly after a session of “couples counseling.” In this version,
he
gets an apartment and marries the first woman he sleeps with, and
she
reads self-help books and joins a gym, gets a fresh look (hair, tattoo), and finds new, weird, short-lived interests (yoga, online dating, religion). Their children rally around her and don’t speak to him, even
on
Thanksgiving, and vow not to marry unless it’s for forever.

After Ian and I wed, we morphed into yet another tired and overused contemporary family story. We were the “blended family.” There are usually two versions of this, too, I’ve found. In version one, the kids don’t accept the new partner, and in version two, they do. In our first scenario, the children blame the new wife for every change they see in their father, from a too-fashionable style of sunglasses to a never-before-seen assertiveness. The new wife gets chilly hugs and the-way-Mom-does-it-better stories, as the daughters (usually daughters) act like mini-wives, scheming to rid the house of the intruder who is monopolizing Daddy’s time, money, and affection. They give sentimental gifts involving old photographs, ruffle his hair in ways that seem disconcertingly seductive, and deliver information back to Mom that requires her to phone Daddy immediately after their weekend with her “concern.” Daddy (he’s always “Daddy”) alternatingly plunges into grief or walks around unaware, little bluebirds of Daddy love tweeting around his oblivious head. If during one visit they don’t step on the backs of the new wife’s metaphorical shoes or don’t pull the metaphorical chair out from under her, he’s sure that all the bad feelings are now in the past. He magically forgets everything that came before; it’s a clean slate in his mind. He’s performed some misplaced act of contrition on their behalf, sure of their goodness. Next time, they will step on the backs of her shoes and pull the chair out from under her. This is the stuff of fairy tales.

In scenario two, the children are fond of the stepparent but
must hide those feelings from the real parent as if they are potentially world-endingly nuclear. Which, of course, they are.

Yet, in spite of the clichés, there are the snapshot moments where the pain of it belongs to no one but you. The banality shatters, and what is suddenly, horribly there is all yours. Like watching war on television, or some earthquake, any tragedy—it’s just another war or earthquake or tragedy, until you see that dead arm with a watch on it or a child’s shoe sitting among the rubble.

Example: That second Christmas Eve after our separation, Abby was celebrating with Mark and his family at his parents’ home, and Ian was still with Mary and their children at his. I should have at least made other plans, but I stupidly hadn’t foreseen the danger. I wasn’t alone but ALONE, me and that cheap, scrawny tree I’d bought at Safeway because it was all I could afford and all I could wrestle onto the top of old Blue Beast. The weeping and aching that came that night were so old and so far in that nothing felt worth that kind of agony. Even with fists in walls and heels in ribs, leaving Mark felt like a mistake.

Example: Bethy and Kristen finally agreed to see Ian after we’d been married for several months. They met him for one hour, over lunch, at a Greek café near his work. Mary had dropped them off, and she waited in her car to pick them up. He’d hoped it was a first step, a new beginning. Maybe they would look at him and remember that he was their dad and not some villain. But they’d come to deliver news. Kristen’s middle school graduation was coming up, and they thought it best that he didn’t come. It would make their mother too uncomfortable. That night, he sat up alone in the dark again. I brought him a blanket and a pillow. It was obvious he would be sleeping on the couch. His voice was miserable but angry, too. He glared at me from across the room.
I am missing so much of their lives
, he’d said.

Example: Abby likes Ian. We’d take her and her friends to
dinner, and we watched movies and went on hikes. He practiced with her for her driving test. They have a good relationship. After we married, we lived in my old house for almost two years until Abby finished high school. She made waffles and watched TV on our couch, just as she always had, and the same stuffed toys were on her bed: Ginger-Man (an orange-brown bear), Bibby, her old monkey. But she never came into our bedroom to tell me something she’d forgotten or to ask if I knew where her headband was. She avoided our room. There was, after all, a different man beside me in our bed, and it was Ian there with his bare shoulders above the sheets, not her father. Or we’d be watching a movie downstairs, and Ian would fart. Abby would leave that room then, making an excuse about homework or calling a friend. We both felt this—the uneasiness of it, the awkwardness, the
wrongness
. There are intimacies that belong only within a family. A real family. Her discomfort and mine, it told me there were ways he would always be a stranger to us.

Love
—well, of course I loved him, but there were things I didn’t see, and things I didn’t understand or know yet. In the chaos and rush of rescue, one cannot slow down for long enough to see clearly and understand. Love—long-lasting love—requires more information. It requires time. When you’re drowning, though, there is no time. You are blinded by the waves over your head and the panic of trying to breathe. When you’ve turned love into survival, the outstretched hand is what matters most.

The noise in my car is getting louder, but I can’t think about that now. I feel like someone’s chasing me, and I keep watching my rearview mirror to determine if it’s true. I must get home as fast as possible. I need to hurry. As soon as I am home … What? I don’t know. I just need to get there and lock the door behind me.

It’s late when I arrive. One of those flyers has blown off a telephone pole, and Ian stares up at me from the gravel parking strip. I pick it up and crumple it. I shove it deep into my pocket. Most of the houseboats are dark, except for Kevin and Jennie’s—they’re probably up with their baby. Maggie and Jack’s bedroom window flickers with television light. I think I hear footsteps behind me on the dock, but when I look over my shoulder, I see no one.