Learning to Stay (30 page)

“You come here!” he said.

I shook my head at him. “You’re insane—it’s pouring!” I yelled through the barely open window.

“Come on,” he said to me. And he looked such a picture standing there—his T-shirt soaked through and clinging to him, showing off the curves of his arms and his chest, rivulets of water running from his flattened hair, that crooked smile of his—that I put the car into park and did as he said. By the time I made it to his side, there wasn’t a dry spot on me. Brad took my hand and pulled me to him.

“What are you doing?” I squealed. “Seriously, Brad, Noah’s going to float by any minute. Let’s go!”

He took my face in his hands. For a second he just looked at me,
studying me. Then he kissed me so softly that it was hard to tell his lips from the falling rain.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said.

Zach is holding the restaurant door open, waiting for me to follow him back inside for a nightcap, but my legs aren’t moving.

“Zach,” I say, shaking my head, “I—I think I’m going to call it a night. Walk home.”

He eyes my footwear—black boots that look more uncomfortable than they actually are. His forehead knits together and his eyes cloud with concern. He is ever the chivalrous one.

“I’ll be all right,” I say.

“Okay, Sabatto,” he says. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Zach nods then. “All right,” he says, his voice soft and husky. “Be safe, you. Good night.”

He blows me a playful kiss, and I reach out theatrically to grab it, bringing my fist to my lips and looking to make sure Zach sees me do this. I want to end things this way, infused with all the good-natured, harmless flirting of our past. But he has already let the door close behind him. Tonight, there is no car trailing me as I walk. And tonight, when I reach home, there’s no car idling halfway down the block, its occupant checking to make sure I’ve arrived safely.

I spend much of the next week tying up loose ends at work and at home. I decide I will leave once the house is rented, expecting that it could take weeks—or longer. But I have forgotten that we live mere blocks from two hospitals and the university, and within days an incoming internal medicine resident has committed to renting the place, sight unseen and fully furnished, for the next year.

It’s a big decision I’m making. And one I’m making all on my own. I’m giving up our home without consulting my husband. I have corresponded with Brad only by text or e-mail in the past weeks because I don’t know what to say to him. This is a decision we would have arrived at—or not—jointly in the past. But Brad can’t carry this house on the meager stipend he receives from the military or live here alone, and I can’t continue to carry on as we were on the off chance that something will improve. Somewhere along the way, our relationship has become an oligarchy.

The house is quiet as I pack my clothes, then Brad’s, and then our personal effects—pictures and papers and prized books. I consider playing some music but decide against it. I’m packing up our life, and when I unpack these things, that life may or may not still exist. This is
a ceremony that should be performed with some reverence—one deserving of silence.

I realize in the early evening hours of Saturday that the only thing left to do is load all of our things into the car and clean out the refrigerator. I’ve been here alone for more than a month and there isn’t much in it—just some condiments and a jug of sour milk.

I am surrounded by boxes and bins, and as I look around the living room, I wish this job would take longer. I don’t want it to be such quick work. I don’t want it, period.

Because there’s the fireplace that Brad used to have lit and toasty warm by the time I returned home from work on Fridays so we could collapse in front of it and talk the night away, catching up with each other after another chaotic week. The living room that we would sprawl over on Sunday mornings, swapping sections of the
New York Times
and sipping coffee well into the afternoon. There’s Brad’s empty recliner, and I can almost feel his arms around me as I sat in his lap the night before he shipped out, my head against his chest and legs flung over the armrest, him rocking me like a baby. What am I supposed to do with all of these memories?

I decide I can do this later. I need a break. I also need to tell Darcy that I’m leaving, and I owe her that news in person.

I send her a text to see if she can meet me somewhere for a drink. She writes back that Collin’s parents are out of town and she doesn’t have a last-minute sitter, but I’m welcome to come over. So I do.

During the drive I rehearse what I will say, how I plan to make her understand. I think of things that will help her see things from my point of view. But by the time I arrive at her street, I can concentrate only on the knots in my stomach. My mind has gone blank.

As I walk up Darcy’s front walk, I tell myself that she might not even care. I haven’t been the best friend to her lately, after all. I haven’t exactly been around. She might not miss me.

I am a terrible liar. Even to myself.

As nice as the weather has been this week, a cold front has moved in tonight and Darcy has a fire going. I settle in on the couch and she brings me a glass of wine, like always. She sits on the love seat and curls her legs beneath her.

“So what’s going on, you?” she asks.

I would like to start with small talk. Actually, I would like not to be having this conversation at all. But I don’t see that I have a choice.

“I need to tell you something,” I say to her, “and I need you to hear me out.”

“Everything okay?” she asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know. Not now, maybe, but I think it will be.”

Darcy leans forward. She’s concerned. In a few moments she will be angry. I’d like to stay right here, on this side of that divide. I’m looking into the expanse that’s about to open between us, and consider backing away from the edge. But it’s too late.

“Elise, what’s going on?”

I breathe deeply and jump. “I’m leaving. For a while. I don’t know how long. I quit my job and rented my house.” I close my eyes like a child.

“You what?”

I look up and meet Darcy’s eyes. They’re confused, hurt. Not angry.

“It’s all happened really quickly, Darce. I know I’m springing this on you, but I’m sort of springing it on myself, too. I’ve hardly had time to think about it.”

“Well,” she says, her voice barely audible, “maybe you should. You never even mentioned this possibility.”

I knew this would be the rub—that, and what comes next.

“And what about Brad?”

Stuffed into that question are all sorts of micro-questions: Have
you thought about him in all this? Are you leaving him? What is he supposed to do? Do you care? And I have one answer for all of them: I don’t know.

“He’s up with his dad,” I say.

“He hates his dad.”

“Well,” I say, keeping my voice light, “hate’s a strong word.”

“Elise.”

“I know, Darce. It’s all messed up. I know I’m complaining to the wrong person and all, which is why I haven’t talked to you about it before, even though I should have. I know I should have. But it’s bad. Things between us are bad.”

“Bad how?”

I picture Brad curled up next to Jones in the barn. A mental slideshow of all that preceded that night plays through my mind, in reverse—right back to the night when I came home to find him standing in our kitchen, spit out by the desert safe and sound. Or so I thought.

I tell Darcy about some of it. Enough to give her a picture of what my life has been like lately. A faint babble wafts from the hallway: “Mum-mum-mum-mum.”

“Are you keeping a motorboat in there?” I ask, nodding in the direction of Mia’s room. I smile, but Darcy’s mouth is thin-set.

“You don’t get to do this,” she says. Her voice comes out in little more than a whisper now and it’s shaky, as if she’s on the verge of tears. “You got Brad back. You don’t get to leave him. Not now. Not like this.”

There are two sentences competing for airtime in my head, lobbying to be said out loud. One is, “I’m not leaving him,” which is drowned out by one word “yet.” The sentence that should be in contention and isn’t, is, “I’m not thinking of leaving him.”

Darcy is shaking her head. Her eyes are pressed shut. When she
finally opens them, she says, “You didn’t have to meet that plane, Elise. You didn’t have to see that flag-draped coffin come off it. You can’t imagine what that’s like. To know that inside that wood box is your husband. To feel your heart lurch twenty-one times during that salute, or feel the weight of that folded flag in your hands. I can say it’s awful, but that doesn’t come close.

“You didn’t have to figure out how to get the deed to your house into your name. You didn’t need to access his accounts to make sure there wasn’t anything outstanding in any of them. And you don’t stay up nights worrying that you won’t be able to remember anything to tell your daughter about her dad except generic platitudes like, ‘He was such a great guy,’ or ‘He loved you so much.’”

I know losing Collin has been awful for Darcy. It’s been awful for me to see her slogging her way through it all. I know I haven’t been around enough, and I know that even if I could have been, there’s not a thing I could do to lift the tiny, heavy burdens that keep weighing her down. She’s right. I can’t imagine what it’s been like to be her. But does that exempt me from faltering? Wallowing some? Why do I have to hold it all together and be overjoyed, too, simply because Brad came home?

I want Darcy to know all this, but I look at her and see that her face is still hard. She’s deep inside herself, in her own misery, like Brad gets sometimes.

My husband came back and hers did not. There is no purer truth than that. There is nothing I can say to change those facts. And because of them, I will win—or lose—either way, every time.

“He didn’t ask for this, Elise. He did what was asked of him.”

“I didn’t, either,” I say. It sounds like whining, when I really only want her to see it from my point of view, too. I want her to understand the pain I feel in knowing that if I stay with this man—this good, good man who is being attacked by his own mind and memories—I
will never, ever have the chance to be a mother. Ever. I will never feel truly safe in my own home. I will always be afraid, every time I leave the house, that my husband might not still be alive when I return. I am a strong person. A loyal person. A good person. And yet, I still don’t know if I can live that way for the rest of my life. Worse yet, I don’t know if I want to.

“I just need some time to clear my head is all,” I say.

“So what are you going to do? Where are you going to go?”

“California,” I say. “I’m going to stay with Sondra for a while.”

Darcy’s face hardens. “So you’re leaving. Like her.”

“You can’t judge her.”

“I can and I will. This is bullshit, Elise. Sondra I could see, but you? I never expected this of you.”

She’s lecturing me and it makes me angry. I don’t begin to pretend to know what it’s been like to be Darcy, to awaken each morning and remember, in a jolt in that first full moment of consciousness, that you’re truly alone. That you will never see your husband again. I can only imagine; I can’t know. So how is it that Darcy feels so free to assume what my life is like? To criticize me for not skipping merrily along behind Brad with a broom and dustpan so I can pick up the pieces every time he implodes?

“So what’s your plan?” she asks. “What are you going to do out there, anyway?”

“I don’t know, Darce. Maybe I’ll do something totally different—become a real estate agent, get a gig as a tour guide, go to cooking school. The possibilities are endless.” I spread my arms wide and grin at her, trying to diffuse my own anger and hers.

Instead, she asks seriously, “Cooking school? Do you have stacks of hundred-dollar bills at home that you’re willing to use as kindling?”

“No,” I say, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“That would be a better use of your money than your trying to learn to cook.”

I set my glass of wine down. “You don’t have to be rude,” I say. “This isn’t the end of the world, you know. It’s life. People do this sort of thing all the time—take detours, go off on tangents, figure things out in imperfect ways.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Darcy says. She nearly spits her words. “You’re living in la-la land. This”—she waves her arm out in front of her from left to right, taking in the contents of the great room and kitchen of her house—“
this
is life. Life is hard. It’s hard and it’s messy. I have a daughter to raise by myself now, and a house to keep up on my own. I have to scrape together a mortgage payment every month because I can’t bring myself to cash Collin’s SGLI payout. It’s like that money is the sum total of his life—all it’s worth—and it feels so wrong to pay for a bunch of wood and plaster with his
life
.”

Darcy’s face is wet and her top lip is quivering. Her eyes are hard, steely marbles trained on me.

“You think I
wanted
any of this? Nothing has worked out how I wanted, but I don’t get to cut and run. No one does—including Brad. But you think you deserve to. You think you’re owed something more than the rest of us. Well, you’re not.”