The One Who Got Away: A Novel (17 page)

“Really?”  

“I was a ghostwriter. Which I
loved, but it didn’t pay a lot of bills, and Paul and I agreed it wasn’t very
important. Though I always looked at it as practice. I would tell other
people’s stories the best I could until I was practiced enough to write my
own.”  

“Okay. So you were typing up
other people’s words and stories every day.  But when was the last time you
wrote
something that only you could write? Something that required you to go deep
inside, into your private garden patch, to enter your tiny gate at your tiny
fence, and to pull something out? When was the last time you did that
thing
you
do? Your art?”

“I’m not sure you could call it
art. And you’ve never even read any of my writing. Not
that
kind of
writing. The stuff that comes from deep inside.”

“I know. But I know you used to
love it. And I know that it comes from you. And if it comes from you, then I
know that it is real and it is honest and it is lovely.”

Tears came to her eyes, and she
allowed them. She allowed them to rise up and to cloud her vision. “I haven’t
written like that in a while,” she said. “But some of it can be...dark.”

“Good. Then you know it’s honest
and real. Besides, I like the dark you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. From what I remember the
entire package tasted like raspberries. Light. Dark. The center in between.”

She was silent for a moment. “So
you think I should write again,” she said, after a beat.

“I’ve learned to never start a
sentence with ‘you should,’” he replied. “But I think art is the only thing
that truly gives you a break from this life.”  

She nodded. “I remember that,
when I was writing, when I was spending an afternoon just sitting there and recording
the actions and the conversations of people who have never existed outside of
my own imagination, I completely entered a zone, and, when I was finished, I
emerged as though I had been to Mars. I would spin around and act all happy. I
remember that.”

“It’s the ultimate refreshment.
Better than tea. Better than booze. Better than everything. Well, nearly everything.”

Olivine began talking, quickly
now: “When I was a kid and I created stories, I used to believe I was actually
being transported to a different place, a realm where these things actually
happened to me. And when I wanted to go home again, I imagined that I could
snap my fingers, and this simple action would bookmark me in that place, so I
could return precisely to where I left off. And in that place, I could be on a
trapeze, or in a canoe, or standing up on bike pedals, with the wind whistling
in my face. And I didn’t ever know what I was going to do next. But I could do
anything.”

She remembered, then, what it
felt like to just relax and to start talking. To talk about things that were
important to her, without a fear of judgment or reproach. To talk to someone
she could trust. Someone with whom she could enjoy even the gaps
between
words.

In the early days with Paul, he
would leave for work and she knew he would be gone for at least ten hours and
so she would just sit, maybe listening to the tumble of the dryer and the click
of her fingertips on the keyboard. That soft and gentle rhythm. It was
difficult, at times, to shift out of the quiet mind, to return to the real
world, but she needed that time alone with her writing like she needed water or
food.

One day, Paul had come home and,
before she could close out the window on her computer, he had stood behind her
and he had read aloud what she had written. He read it in a high voice,
sing-songy and mocking. He had read what come straight out of her soul—the unedited
part, the product of her red and bleating center—before it was meant to be read,
and he had ridiculed it. First she was shocked that someone who so closely
guarded his own privacy would do this, and then the hurt came. It took her
breath away for a moment, and when she turned to look at him, he understood
what he had done. He had tried to take it back. He had said he just wanted to
know what she had done all day while he was at work. And she had nodded toward
him and said it was okay. But she knew, with certainty, that she would never
trust him with the deepest part of her. Sometime after that, she had stopped
writing.

And then a shard of memory from
she and Henry, ten years before. They had been standing in an art gallery, and
she was feeling kind and funny and desirable, the way Henry always made her
feel. Loose and real. And she had made a joke about something, off the cuff. She
couldn’t even remember what it was, but she had said it to the gallery owner,
who had been standing there in pressed white cotton with his arms crossed, and
the gallery owner chuckled, and she heard Henry laugh behind her, and she
turned to  Henry, and he was looking at her in his way: with deep admiration,
his eyes luminous and bright. No man had ever looked at her like that, besides,
perhaps, her own father when she was very young. And she decided then that this
should be every young woman’s goal when it came to love: To find a man who
would look at her like
that
. It had created a tickling sensation deep in
her belly, and it had made her stomach lurch like she was going up, up, up and
over something steep and splashy.

And just then, sitting on the
porch of the family cabin, with the cold planks biting into the skin on the
back of her legs, and the sun starting to set, and the chill moving through her
thin pullover, she was seized by the notion that, not only did she want to have
children, she wanted to have them with him. With Henry. Just so that he could
look at them like that. Just so that he could look at them like he wanted to place
them in the sky, like tiny stars. Suspend them in the forever.

A look like that, she knew, was
the ultimate gift for a child, and it was a look you couldn’t put on. You
couldn’t fake it. It had to come from someplace deep and true and real. And she
could see them, suddenly, her girls, just as she could the other night at dinner.
Each had deep brown eyes, flecked with amber like their father’s. They were
holding pomegranates in cupped hands, the fruits red and ripe and as big as
their faces. They were both wearing yellow dresses and standing in an aspen
forest in the autumn, golden and bright in slanted, burnished light.

“
Remember what we talked about so
long ago?” Henry asked.

“Probably,” she replied. “I remember
a lot. Maybe everything.”

“We talked about picking up and
leaving. About writing a book. About the graffiti in bathrooms across America.
About limping along, picking up odd jobs and taking photos and writing snappy
little details about the entire countryside.”

“Yeah. I’ve thought about it so
many times. In fact, after you left. I did that. All by myself.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. Well, I didn’t write an
entire book, but I took off. Across the countryside.”

“What happened?”

“I’ve never told anyone about
this,” she replied. “Not the whole story at least.”

“Seems to be that kind of night.
Go on.”

“Okay,” she began.

“Wait,” he interrupted. “Are you
cold?”  

“Freezing.”

“Me too. Excuse me for just a
minute.” He jogged to the bus, his feet not seeming to touch the forest floor,
and he returned with a quilt, thick and velvety.

He placed it on the floorboards,
sat on it, and motioned her forward. She nestled between his legs and settled
back into him, and he wrapped the blanket around them both. His body felt hard
behind her. Solid. He smelled of cedar.

“Okay, start at the beginning,”
he said.

“Well,” Olivine began, “I needed
proof. Some kind of proof that I was okay, even without you. I had never wanted
or needed anything—anyone outside my own family—and all of a sudden, I
discovered that a part of me had gone missing when you left. An essential part.
But I wanted to prove that I was whole, complete. All on my own. That I was not
the pining woman I promised never to be.”

She could feel his breath come in
and out behind her. She continued: “So I got in my car. I packed up the things
I needed, which, I discovered wasn’t a whole lot. And then I flipped a coin
before I got on the interstate. The coin came up ‘tails,’ so I headed east. And
through a series of gut decisions, long days of driving, and subsequent coin
flips, I ended up in a small town in the hills of North Carolina, where I
found, quite by accident on a side street at the edge of town, a sprawling
boarding house, with towering magnolia trees in the front yard and a veranda on
which sat a tiny table, set with fresh biscuits and sweet tea. And there was a
hand-lettered sign in the window: ‘Rooms for rent. Pay by the week.’ And so I
went inside and I met with a man named Hank, and I moved in that day. And Hank
had a library, a great library with a rolling ladder and overstuffed chairs
that smelled of old pipe smoke and yellowed pages. This is something I’ve
always dreamed of having.”

“I remember. I remember you
talking about that. You didn’t have a dream home…just a dream room. A library,”
Henry said. “Go on.”

“I fell in love with the place
instantly, as you can imagine. There were three other renters. One, a couple,
who had a faux painting and finishing company called ‘Faux You.’”

“Catchy.”

She laughed. “And there was
another tenant. An older guy, Rodney. He was Hank’s best friend of thirty
years. He and Hank would share a pint or so of whiskey before lunch each day.
And then Rodney would go off for a little walk. Each day, he would hobble out
of the house, and he would return a little while later. Rodney sort of took a
liking to me, for lack of a better term. Mostly because I was too polite to
shrug him off, and over time, too polite to run.”

“How old was this guy?”

“Oh, like seventy. Maybe eighty.
It was hard to tell. Let’s just say the man was weathered. He had wrinkles so
deep around his mouth. Crevices. And his hair was yellow. Not blond, but butter
yellow, the color of a cigarette filter after all the tobacco has been sucked
through.”

“Go on.”

“Rodney started to plan out my
days for me. He wasn't a stalker or anything…”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Well, no.” Olivine laughed.
“But I had a car and sometimes he needed to get around—go to the store or to
the doctor—and I didn’t want him driving himself around, in his state of
constant inebriation. I felt sort of stuck, but I was never one to admit that I
had gotten myself in over my head.”

She could feel him nodding his
head from behind her. “Anyway, one day, I arrived home to find a silver Lexus
in the driveway. And, as I walked through the door, I was met by a large woman
with shiny long gray hair, twisted up behind her head. She had kind eyes, and
she took me by the hand and she sat me on the couch in the formal living room,
and she started speaking to me in a soft and deeply southern voice—the voice of
people with manners and gentility and deep, deep roots to a people who take
pride in speaking properly. I liked her instantly and I was enjoying listening
to her voice so much that I didn’t hear at first what she was saying. She held
my hand on the sofa and she asked me how long I had been acquainted with Hank,
and I told her ‘just two weeks’ and that I had only just moved in, and she
said, ‘Well, some things have changed.’ She told me that Hank had died that
afternoon. She did not say where or under what circumstances, but he never left
the house and he spent most of his time smoking filter-less cigarettes in his
library and drinking whiskey from a tiny glass tumbler. And so I could imagine
how it had all happened. A heart attack, a stroke. Something catastrophic in
this quiet little house on this quiet little street. I wondered for a moment
who had found him, and I thanked the Lord it wasn’t me.”

“Wow, no kidding,” Henry said,
and she felt his breath hot against her neck as he spoke.

Olivine continued: “The woman
said, finally, ‘Things will be different from now on…with Hank gone. I own this
house, and I don’t intend it for boarders.’ Her voice was so genteel and kind,
I wondered: where was her grief? And, as though she read my mind, she said that
she and Hank had been divorced, amicably, for decades. And she explained that she
had been allowing him to live in her family estate because he wasn’t fit for
other kind of work, due to his condition. I didn’t ask her to elaborate. Was
his condition alcoholism? A heart condition? Either way, the man had passed,
and she was trying to ask me to move out. ‘Perhaps,’ she continued, ‘you could
share with me your long term plans and I might be able to help you make other
arrangements.’ And so I babbled something: ‘Oh, I’m from Colorado.’ I said. ‘I
wasn’t here long enough to lay down any roots and now would be a good time to
move on. I can be out soon. Tomorrow.’

“‘Oh, heavens,’ she had said, ‘You
don’t need to go so fast. But do begin making your arrangements, please. I’ll
talk to the other boarders.’

“I was ready to leave. I think I only
left Colorado—I only struck out on my own like that—to prove that I could. And
I wrote a lot while I was there. That’s how I can remember the details of the
boarding house, of that library, of Rodney’s hair. And, besides that
wrap-around veranda, buried in vines and magnolias, I would miss that beautiful
library and my private bath with the clawed tub, but I knew I could go
somewhere else. I could just flip a coin, and be gone.”