Imagine Me Gone (41 page)

That’s what kept coming back to me in the numbness of the afternoon after Alec’s call: how deeply I had made that promise, and how long I had kept it, never being with a man who might leave me. Always maintaining that control.

A promise to oneself never to be left. What sleight of mind.

The radio station at BC, where Michael had DJ’d, aired a tribute show, playing the music he had championed. Alec, my mother, Caleigh, and I listened to it together in the living room in Walcott. Caleigh had come to stay with us at the house for a couple of days before the memorial. There were a hundred things to do, and Alec and I did more or less all of them, working together like the well-honed team we sometimes were. My mother, who never got sick, came down with a heavy cold. Her friends Suzanne and Dorothy brought meals to the house for us, and arranged the food for after the service.

It seemed to me the wrong time to announce my own news that Paul and I had decided to get married, which I’d been waiting to tell my mother in person at Christmas, but Paul disagreed and said she would want to know, which once I reflected on it seemed right—to give her that. The morning before we flew back to California, I found her upstairs in her bedroom, writing thank-you notes to the people who had sent their condolences. She cried again when I told her—for me, and for Michael—but I was glad that I had done it.

I gave myself a few days back at home before going in to see my clients again. It was hard at first. And it stayed hard for months. To sit there quietly, hands folded in my lap, listening to them elaborate on their troubles. An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for the moments in their past that contained the key to liberating them in the present. That’s what I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn’t offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on, I realized that my clients’ lives weren’t works of art. They told themselves stories all the time, but the stories trailed off, got forgotten, and then repeated—distractions themselves, oftentimes, from the feelings they were somewhere taught would damn them or wreck them.

It had taken me a long time to see how strong this desire for an answer was. I had to train myself to notice how it arose, and how to put it aside. Because if all I did was scour what a person said to me each week for clues, I wouldn’t do her much good. I had to give up my own need to cure if I was going to stand any chance of shepherding her toward acceptance of who she already was.

I never did that for Michael. I never gave up my belief in a secret, a truth lodged in the past, which if he could only experience and accept would release him. I thought of it as that moment of his in the woods with my father and Kelsey and me. An awkward teenager living in a town he loathed, on a walk he didn’t want to take, trudging through his unhappiness as adolescents do. And then through no will of his own, as we came to that clearing and paused, sensing all around him a malignancy he couldn’t name, a violence he had to escape. A vision of evil.

When Alec told me what Michael had said to him on their last night, about feeling guilty for going back to England without somehow warning us, I thought to myself: Yes, that was it, the moment he needed to confess and let go of. As if it were that simple.

He’d sounded so desperate on the phone from Maine. And yet I hadn’t said what I should have to Alec—that it had gone too far, too quickly, and that he had to stop it. I’d kept believing in the one catharsis. As Alec did, and my mother, in her own manner, and even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead. I believed that before. But now I know it’s true. It’s what he kept trying to tell us.

Alec

Seth’s sister, Valerie, picked us up at the airport. I greeted her from the backseat as the two of us piled in with our luggage.

“So you exist,” she said. “Welcome.” She had the same fine black hair as her brother, only longer and with a slight wave to it, and the same dark green eyes. “Don’t worry about Luke there,” she said, “he’s out cold.” The head of the toddler strapped into the safety seat beside me rested back and away from his little body, a clear streak of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth.

Beyond the terminal and the car-rental lots, the view opened onto a flat and nearly empty plain, an expanse of scrub brush stretching either side of the highway. The low clouds of a winter sky met the outline of foothills on the far horizon. Valerie sped down the passing lane, cruising by trucks and utility vans as she and Seth chatted over the sound of hit radio turned low. After a while billboards appeared, followed by gasworks and factories, and mile after mile of single-story warehouses built along empty access roads. Eventually I could see trees and the beginnings of neighborhoods, the Denver skyscrapers still off in the distance.

Seth’s parents lived in a large ranch house on a street of ranch houses set back on one-acre lots lined with cottonwoods. His mother met us at the door wearing a white blouse and a necklace of braided pink coral.

“There now,” she said, placing her hand gently on my arm. “I finally get to lay eyes on you.”

I’d expected a friendly reception from her, in particular, given what Seth had told me, but the warmth of it came as a surprise. She led us onto the sunporch, where she’d put out cookies and iced tea. In the yard beyond, a blue tarpaulin sagging with unmelted snow covered a swimming pool rimmed in white concrete. There were well-tended juniper hedges and a flagstone path leading down the middle of the lawn to a creek. All of it appeared to me as most everything had for the last many weeks, as a still photograph of a place now vanished.

Seth’s mother and sister asked me anodyne questions about what parts of Colorado I had visited, and about the winter weather in New York, any topic other than my family. I answered politely, watching Luke roll on the floor with his grandmother’s terrier.

Since Seth and I had met, I had wanted to come here and meet his family, but for the last two months it had been hard to want anything. It will be good for us, Seth had said, encouraging me. It’s time. And so I had come.

After our snack, I went to nap in the room we’d been given on the opposite end of the house from his parents’ room. It wasn’t Seth’s. He hadn’t grown up in the house. It was a room meant for guests. Plush beige carpet, a chaise longue under the window, two sinks at a double vanity between two sets of louvered closet doors. I fell asleep as soon as I laid my head on the pillow.

An hour or more later, Seth woke me with a kiss on the forehead. He rubbed my chest and kissed me again on the lips.

“They want to take you to the mall without me. Is that awful?”

I had been terrified that I would lose him. That Michael’s death and the blank state it had delivered me into would annul what we had begun. But he had helped me as no one else could have by insisting we go forward with finding a place to live together, even when it seemed for a few weeks that I might not get my job back. At my weakest moment, he had refused to doubt us.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

His mother and sister and I drove for twenty minutes in his mother’s ample Lincoln, through a wide grid of commercial strips whose intersections had long lights and generous turning lanes, the late-afternoon sun glinting off the columns of windshields.

“We didn’t mean to kidnap you,” his mother said. “But he’s kept you to himself long enough, and I have to ask somebody what he likes to wear these days.”

“You’re earning major points,” Valerie half whispered to me as we crossed the parking lot. “This is what she does with people she likes.”

It was Saturday and the mall was full. Parents herded small children through crowds of dashing teens. Seniors ambled along the promenade. Salespeople in chinos and polo shirts smiled vaguely from the stools of jewelry carts. A janitor mopped orange soda from the white tile floor, while above and through it all played “Friday I’m in Love,” one of the Cure’s lighter pop ballads.

“I just want to know if he’s as much of a neat freak with you as he is with us,” Seth’s mother said. “He practically alphabetizes his shirts.”

In the Brooks Brothers, I limited myself to recommending mediums over larges and suggested Seth would probably want to purchase his own jeans. When his mother pressed me to let her buy me a tie, I fended her off with Valerie’s help.

We kept at it for an hour or so, through several stores, and then sat together at a Starbucks. They asked me more questions, venturing now onto the subject of my mother, and of Celia and Paul. I did my best to reciprocate, inquiring about where in Denver they had lived when Seth was a kid, and about Valerie’s work as a guidance counselor. It was kind of them to be doing this with me, and I wanted them to know that I was glad for it.

By the time we got back to the house Seth’s father and Valerie’s husband, Rick, had arrived and were in the sprawling kitchen with Seth unloading meat from a cooler. His father was an older, rougher version of Seth, taller by a few inches, with a larger jaw and broader shoulders, and the mottled skin of a man who’d spent his life working outdoors. He had the same upright posture, the same way of gesturing with his shoulders, and he spoke in that clipped rhythm of Seth’s, flat and quick. Their resemblance was uncanny.

He gave my hand a firm shake, introduced his son-in-law, and then asked me if I liked to grill. Rick stood a few feet off holding a platter of marinated steak.

“Alec wants to talk to us,” Seth’s mother said as she leaned down beside her husband to rummage through the vegetable drawers of the fridge.

“You’re saying he can’t make up his own mind?” his father retorted, as though I were not in the room. Seth smiled at me in mock apology but remained conveniently silent. Rick’s expression suggested the better choice was to join them. Reaching over his wife’s back, Seth’s father grabbed me a beer from the top shelf, and the three of us walked out onto the patio together.

They had come from a meeting with a developer. A set of permits for a condominium on the outskirts of downtown had been delayed, costing their firm thousands of dollars. They included me in their talk of the minutiae of contracting as though I were an old pro.

“I’ve been telling Seth for a couple years we need a designer,” his father said. “He’s got a job here anytime he wants it.”

The burnished gold of his father’s wedding ring and the gold face of his watch caught the light of the flames. I found it hard not to keep staring at him, the way he had planted himself in front of the grill, moving only his hands and arms as he flipped the slabs of meat with a fork, addressing his comments to the fire. I wondered how he saw me. What did he think of the man who slept with his son? Did my presence force him to imagine it? Had his wife instructed him to accept me? Had he ever desired another man himself?

At the dinner table he stood at the head and carved the steak into strips, arranging them on the plates his wife held out for him, making sure everyone had been served before sitting. As we ate, Seth reported on our plans for a trip up to the mountains early the following week, and Valerie and her mother made suggestions for places we should stop along the way. When Rick asked me what kind of work I did, Seth’s mother answered for me, informing him that I wrote about politics. At that point a quiet descended on the table.

“If those congressmen sell themselves any faster,” Seth’s father said, “they’ll be shipping their own jobs to China.”

I laughed. And soon everyone was laughing, nervously relieved, Seth most of all. He slid a hand onto my knee under the table and squeezed it. I couldn’t remember the last time I had let go even this much. His father, delighted with the response to his quip, began to opine on government corruption and shoddy foreign building materials, and the uncertainties of interest rates, until eventually his wife told him he was boring us and announced there was pie.

I imagined Celia rolling her eyes at the scene of Valerie and her mother clearing the dishes and disappearing into the kitchen to tidy and wash while the four men kept their seats. But then Seth got up to help them, leaving the three of us alone once again.

“Let’s fix you a drink,” his father said, signaling with a tilt of his head for Rick and me to go through with him into the den. There a leather-topped bar with brass edging and a mirrored shelf stood against a paneled wall. Darkwood beams ran the length of the ceiling. There were birch logs stacked in the grate of a raised hearth. At the far end of the room a brown leather sofa and chairs faced a flat-screen lit up by the vivid colors of a basketball game playing out in silence.

“Rick here is bourbon, and I think tonight I am too—what can I get you, Alec?” He rested his hand on the amber bottle as he awaited my answer, the underside of his link bracelet touching the leather of the bar’s surface.

“Bourbon’s fine,” I said.

He palmed ice into the tumblers and poured three generous drinks.

“Cheers,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time, just for an instant, and offering a small nod of the head, as if allowing me still further into the circle of his acknowledgment. Rick did the same when I glanced at him, and the three of us clinked glasses. It was a simple, male gesture, this little close-lipped dip of the chin, the eyes meeting ever so briefly. I’d given and received the nod a thousand times. It was what remained, I suppose, of tipping your hat. But I’d always experienced it as more than that. As a forswearing of an implicit threat of violence. A sign, between men, of disarmament.