Learning to Stay (7 page)

I hear this conversation for what it is: cocktail-party talk—a way to fill up time in a conversation. It’s a story with themes so obvious that anyone can relate to them and conjure the appropriate incredulous response—anyone except Brad.

Cheri looks to him for his reaction, and for the briefest moment, his face is blank—perplexed, even. Then laughter erupts from somewhere deep inside him, with all the force of a volcanic eruption. He throws his head back and guffaws like he’s front row at a comedy club, like a maniac. One by one, heads turn. I feel the burn of eyes staring at him. And at me.

“You call that a problem?” Brad laughs. “Cabinets and new refrigerators? Jesus Christ, that’s a problem?” Then he leans in to Cheri and, like an older boy asking if a younger one wants to see a stash of stolen
Playboy
magazines, says, “You want to hear a real problem?”

Sensing that nothing good can come from this, I swoop in and grab Brad’s arm, making sure he can see me as I do it, so as not to take him by surprise. “Babe, we need to get going,” I say, trying to make my voice sound as light and sweet as spun sugar, though it will
be quivering all over the place if I am forced to say much more. “Sorry, Cheri,” I say, and I steer Brad toward the kitchen, where Darcy is preparing more appetizers.

“Gotta run!” I call to her. She comes out to hug me, and fortunately, only rubs Brad’s arm.

“It’s good to have you back,” Darcy says to him, and for an instant, I think she’s going to crumble. But she takes a deep breath and smiles. Brad fixes her with a blank stare. I don’t know where he’s gone, but he’s no longer here. Collin is gone, and sometimes I think Brad is, too—just a different kind of gone. This is something I don’t dare say out loud, though. Not to Darcy. Not even to myself.

“I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” I tell her.

When we get into the car, I suggest we should drive the long way home to take in the lights. This is something Brad has always loved doing, and a holiday tradition I have merely tolerated. I steer through Maple Bluff and ooh and aah at the decorations, pointing out the ones I find especially spectacular. Brad stares out the passenger side window. He doesn’t seem to notice one house over any other.

I reach over and link my fingers with his.

“Brad?” I am afraid of what I’m about to ask, but I feel I have to, and so I plow ahead, giving scant thought to the words I’m saying before they tumble out. “When you asked Cheri if she wanted to know what a real problem was, you were talking about over there, weren’t you?”

Brad doesn’t look at me. His gaze is still fixed outside his car window and his face is stony. He nods.

“What were you going to tell her?” I ask him.

“Stop it, E.,” he says.

“What was it like over there, babe?” I press. I am suddenly desperate
to know what he knows. To understand the sort of life he’s lived all these months away from me, from here. To have confirmed or denied that he saw the terrible things, or worse ones, that fill the news each night.

“Goddamn it, Elise. Drop it.”

I’ve seen documentaries on the two world wars, Vietnam, Rwanda, and Kosovo. I’ve seen the cable news coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. I know what the definition of atrocity is. But that was over there, and Brad is here. And I need him to share this with me. I need to feel close to him again. For him to feel that closeness, too. There’s a huge hole in our life together, cut out of the last year by preschool scissors that left ragged edges and pieces strewn about. If we can arrange those pieces into a complete picture that we can both see, maybe then we can resume living this life we built together.

“There’s nothing that happened that would make me think any different of you,” I say. When he doesn’t respond, I squeeze his hand and whisper, “You can tell me. It’s okay.”

Brad snatches back his hand, and when I look into his eyes, they are wild and brimming.

“Goddamn you,” he says.

When I slow to a stop at the intersection of Sherman and Gorham, Brad opens his door and gets out.

“Brad!”

He looks at me before he slams the door. He shakes his head and jogs off.

Twice I roll down the window and call to him to get back in the car, but he ignores me. I resort to trailing him at a speed so slow, it’s nearly idling. If it weren’t for Brad’s outfit—khakis and an untucked button-down shirt—you’d think he was out for a jog, his cadence is so steady and sure.

Outside the car windows, twinkling lights—some multicolored and some white—are blurred by the tears pooling in my eyes. It’s a kaleidoscope of merriment meant for someone else this year.

When I’m certain that Brad is, in fact, headed home, I drive ahead of him. I’m able to start a fire and open a beer for each of us by the time he arrives. When he doesn’t come inside, I meet him on the front porch.

I hold out a bottle to him. “This is a cold and very funny-looking olive branch,” I tell him. He doesn’t laugh, but he takes the bottle from me.

“Come inside,” I say. “I have a fire going.”

This is the way we’ve weathered many a Wisconsin winter—a crackling fire and just the two of us, talking, at the end of the day. It isn’t regular or planned enough to be a routine, but they are the key moments—the day stretching out behind us like a race well run and our voices floating in the dark—that I will remember above any others.

Brad shakes his head and pats the space on the porch step next to him. “I’m tired of being hot. I’m tired of sweat. It’s good to feel cold,” he says.

I’m wearing only a long-sleeved shirt and a thin sweater, and the winter wind cuts straight through to my skin, but I sit down next to Brad. Tonight, we don’t talk. We sit and sip, staring out at the streetlights coating the scene with an effulgence that makes it look as though it’s been painted on canvas.

When the shivering my whole body is doing migrates to my teeth, Brad wraps an arm around my shoulders and pulls me close. I shut my eyes and breathe deeply, and as I do, I hear Sondra’s words in my ears. But they’re drowned out by Brad saying, “Team BE, babe. You and me,” which is what we always called ourselves when things got rough—when we were down to the last twenty dollars in our checking
account even as the monthly bills continued to roll in; when one of our former landlords gave us only two weeks’ notice to find a new place to live in February, in a town where almost every rental is on an August-to-August cycle; or when Brad’s father, Mert, told Brad that “real men join the Marines,” instead of telling Brad that he was proud of him for enlisting in the Army.

“Promise?” I whisper, letting my head loll onto Brad’s chest.

“Promise,” he says.

It is too early in the morning on the Friday after Christmas, and I am staring bleary-eyed at a breakfast of toast and over-easy eggs sprinkled with seasoning salt when Brad tells me he’s going try to get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s PhD program in Russian.

“It might be too late,” I warn. If the UW’s PhD programs are anything like its law school, they’re sticklers for dates and deadlines, and not altogether good about accommodating requests or exceptions.

“Can’t hurt to try,” Brad says. His optimism is infectious. These past weeks he’s been rattling around this house, drinking too much, sleeping when he should be awake, and pacing the fence line of our backyard when he should be sleeping. But this morning, he’s up and showered and dressed. He’s made me eggs. And now he wants to check out options directly related to his future. “You,” I say, waving my fork in his direction, “are quite the guy. You know that?”

He’s adjusting, and I’m adjusting. We’re readjusting to life together. “So there,” I’d like to say to Sondra. I take the bite of egg that is on my fork and set it on my plate; I get up from my seat at the table, and go around to his. I kiss him like I mean it, long and slow, feeling the softness of his lips—the velvety sensation, the distinct contours
of them—against my own. The desire to feel them move from my lips to my neck to other parts of me that are now dressed for work rises up in me like an errant geyser, and I have to push it back down. Damn Judge Kresley and his penchant for scheduling eight a.m. hearings.

I stand up. “I’m going to miss you,” I tell Brad, drawing back and holding his face between my hands. Darcy was scheduled to accompany Sondra to Minneapolis this weekend, but Mia has come down with the chicken pox and is all sorts of miserable, so I’m filling in.

Brad chucks my chin with curled fingers. “It’s two nights, E.,” he says. “No big thing. Anything for a mile, right?”

I smile at the memory—Brad cheering me on during my first, and only, marathon, the Whistlestop in far-northern Wisconsin that runs mostly along an old railroad grade. My GPS wristlet had quit working and so had my legs, and I had no idea how much farther I had to run when I saw Brad up ahead and told him I didn’t think I could finish. “You can do anything for a mile,” he said, and with that mantra stuck in my head, I ran. And ran. It was the longest mile of my life. After the race, I realized that it hadn’t been one mile—it had been four—and I yelled at him: “You told me it was a mile!”

He shook his head. “Nope. That’s what you wanted to hear. What I said was that you can do anything for a mile—and you did. I’m proud of you, E.”

It was the way we signed off on our e-mail messages to each other during his deployment, and thinking back on each day that I woke up without him here over the past year, dwelling on having to spend two nights—not even a full forty-eight hours—apart seems ridiculous. Especially compared to what Sondra—or Darcy—has been facing.

“Anything for a mile,” I repeat now, and I smile at my husband, full of thanks and contentment.

I get up and rinse my dish in the sink and load it into the dishwasher.
I have exactly twenty minutes to make it to work, pick up the files I need, and get to court. I shoulder my workbag and an overnight bag. “Can you handle the recycling?” I ask Brad.

“Sure. At your service,” he says, and I kiss him good-bye.

“See you Sunday,” I say.

“See you Sunday.”

I wonder if Sondra and I will have anything to talk about during the four-hour trip to Minneapolis, but I quickly realize I needn’t have worried. Each of us has a conference call, and for the couple of hours in between we talk about work—about the challenges we’ve faced as career women, the shocking lack of competent bosses and managers in her field and mine, and the merits of our respective fantasy football teams.

“I’ve never met another woman who does fantasy football,” she says. She’s driving with one hand and twirling a piece of hair above her ear into submission. Outside the car windows, the bright afternoon sun seems to be fading by the second to a crisper, thinner, colder version of itself.

“It was cheaper and easier to learn than golf,” I tell her. “Goes a long way with the guys in the office—especially the partners.”

Sondra smiles and wags a finger in my direction. “You’re a cagey one.”

“That’s not why you do it?”

Sondra shakes her head. “No, ma’am. I pretty much grew up on the bleachers of the Stick.”

“The what?”

“Candlestick Park. In San Fran.”

“You’re from California?”

“Born and raised,” Sondra says, and something in her demeanor
changes, as if she’s trying hard to remember something. Or someone. “That was a long time ago. Doesn’t feel like it, but it was.”

I get Sondra talking about her childhood and her family, mostly so I can avoid talking about my own. I couldn’t have ever wished for better parents, but I’ve learned that something about being an orphan, even an adult orphan, tends to spark awkwardness in any conversation.

Sondra jumps on her conference call just as we’re crossing through Hudson. I offer to drive, but she waves me off, and something about the fluid way in which she puts her hands-free headset on and connects the call makes me think that she’s an old pro at having to drive and talk all at once. I’m not fluent enough in pharmaceuticalese to follow the conversation, and I let myself drift off into a dreamless, solid sleep.

When I wake, the sky is black and we’re stopped in front of a behemoth building rising like a giant square moon at the end of a series of parking lots as big as football fields.

“Sorry I fell asleep,” I say. I rub my eyes and shake my head as if to rattle loose the last remnants of sleep. “We’re here?”

Sondra doesn’t answer me. She’s clutching the steering wheel and her forehead is pressed against it.

“Sondra?”

After a good long while, she speaks without lifting her head. “I don’t think I can do this,” she says.

I have no idea what she’s talking about. Do what? We’ve come all this way to visit her husband. This isn’t the first time she’s seen him since he’s been stateside. I don’t see what the issue is. Darcy told me Sondra’s family lived on the West Coast and she was tired of driving all this way by herself every weekend; she hadn’t told me she was a flight risk.

“You mean you can’t do it now?”

Sondra straightens up. She slaps her hands lightly against either side of her face and then runs them through her hair. She inhales and then exhales audibly. Then she shakes her head.