The Stuff That Never Happened (13 page)

I tell him that Sophie is fine. She had an ultrasound last week, and everything seems to be going well. No more bleeding.

“Oh,” he says. “So I suppose that’s made her feel better.”

“Yes, every day that goes by, she’s getting stronger.”

“Good, very good.” Silence. “And is she feeling well?”

“Would you like to speak with her?”

“No, no, that’s fine. I talked to her earlier today. I just wanted to see how things were going with you and see if you need anything.”

“Not a thing. We’re fine.”

Long silence.

He says, “Well, then I’ll hang up now and get back to work.”

“Okay.”

“Oh! Yeah. I was thinking, though … maybe for spring break, you know … maybe Nick and I could take a drive and come see you and Sophie.”

“Oh. That would be good, I guess. If you’re far enough along on your book.”

He laughs a little. “Well, I won’t be. But I should come and see her. And you. Before the baby comes, you know.”

“When is that?”

He laughs. “Well, who knows when babies come? Don’t they have their own timetable that nobody really knows?”

I stay silent.

He clears his throat. “Bad joke. You mean when is spring break? Don’t worry. It’s two weeks from now. This is just advance planning.”

“Okay, then. Sounds nice.”

“Okay. Well, we’ll talk. So … good-bye, then.”

“Bye.”

“I do love you, Annabelle.”

“Yes. Me, too, you. Good night.” I click my phone closed and look up to see Sophie staring at me with wide eyes.

“What?” I say.

“Oh, nothing.” She gets busy smoothing out the covers and yawns and stretches. Then, after a few minutes, she says, “Um, are you and Dad mad at each other?”

I smile at her. I am still trying to be a good example. “No. You know how he hates talking on the phone.”

She laughs. “Well, that’s true. He definitely is an in-person kind of guy,” she says, but she looks uncertain. “Still, I thought he wouldn’t be able to stand having you out of his sight. I thought he’d be calling you every night.”

I can’t help but laugh at that idea. “To tell you the truth, Sophie, I think he’s a little relieved to be alone these days. He’s really working hard on his book. And also, he knows you and I are having good bonding time. I think he doesn’t want to interrupt us.”

She rubs her mound of belly and yawns. “He’s such a good guy. You know?”

“Mmmm.”

“So what’s this book of his about anyway? He hasn’t even told me about it.”

I tell her the short version, that it’s the labor history of a factory, about a time when the factory shut down at the turn of the century, and how the workers all mounted a protest and took it over and kept it going so they wouldn’t lose their jobs. He’s doing the first comprehensive study of this shutdown and its results, interviewing the sons and daughters of some of the workers …

“Wow, that sounds fascinating,” she says. “And this is the first study of it? And the book is going to get published and make him rich?”

“I don’t know about rich, but it’s certainly going to be published. And the thing is, it looks like he’s going to be named acting chair of the department in the fall, so he wants to fin—”

She frowns. “Why? What happened to Mr. Winstanley?”

“Well, it’s been the gossip of the whole year, actually. I can’t believe I didn’t tell you. He left his wife and married a grad student, and they’re—”

“What?
He married a
student?
Jen’s dad married a student?”

I had forgotten somehow that Jennifer Winstanley was in the same class as Sophie. That’s the trouble with small towns; there are a million connections you have to keep track of. Everybody’s in on everything in some way you aren’t able to remember.

“Well, yes, a grad student, and they’re—”

“Oh my God. Mr. Winstanley? That is the ickiest thing I have ever heard of. Ewww. He married one of his students?”

“Actually, she wasn’t
his
student. He met her at a conference, I heard, and then she transferred to the college, and they fell in love, and then when he realized he had feelings for her, he got divorced.”

“Poor Jen! And her mom is
so
nice! God, I can’t believe he left Mrs. Winstanley after all those years because he got the hots for some student. That is so sickening I think I’m going to barf right here.”

“Sophie, come on. You know this kind of thing happens. It’s practically a cliché it’s so common.”

“Not to people like the Winstanleys! He was a strict, upstanding guy. I always thought he was nice when I’d go over their house.”

“Over
to
their house. You didn’t go over their house; you’d be in midair.”

This old line does not distract her from her outrage; in this, she’s exactly like all the faculty women. We all want to hear the details and then to express the mighty outrage. We all love the drama of the situation, and of course, the delicious opportunity to pity poor Mary Lou.

“God. You hear stuff like this and it’s enough to make you hate men. You know? You don’t hear of women doing this—deciding when they’re middle-aged that they’ve just had enough of their husbands. What is
with
these guys?”

“It happens both ways,” I say lamely. “People change, they get bored, they see that their lives are drifting away and they’re not happy, they feel trapped … who knows what it is?”

She stares at me. “I can’t believe you’re defending him!” She throws a wadded-up Kleenex at me. “He’s a jerk.”

“Well, no, I’m not
defending
him. I’m just saying that it’s simplistic to assume there’s just that way of looking at the story. There are always more sides to these things than it looks like on the outside. And people change; their needs change …”

“Yeah, Clark Winstanley changed, all right. He changed into a letch. And you can defend him all you want, but you know that Dad would never, ever do this kind of thing. He just wouldn’t. You must know that. I bet not many women can say they feel that sure of their husbands.”

She says this accusingly, as though I’ve had it too easy. Unearned security or something. I want to say something more about complexity and about all the ways marriages fail, but she’s a woman with a husband far away, and I can tell she can’t hear it now. And God knows I don’t want to upset her. When you’re scared for your life, there is comfort in at least being on the right side of the moral divide.

“You know what Dad said?” she says. “When I was talking to him about getting married to Whit, he told me that when you go into marriage, you have to do it for only one reason—because you know that’s the person you really are going to stay with forever, and it doesn’t matter what they do or who else you meet or what kind of troubles the two of you find yourselves in. You’re in it. You make this deal that you’re going to always work things out. Period. You dig in and you make it work.”

“Jesus,” I say, laughing. “That must have scared you out of your mind. He makes marriage sound like a Siberian prison camp.”

“But you’re a prisoner of luuuvvv,” she says. “That makes it all okay. Because you’re perfectly safe. Someone has said he will love you no matter what.”

•   •   •

IS IT bad to say that the best part of each day is when I go out to the market to stock up on groceries? There are glorious oranges, apples, asparagus tips, and dark green spinach leaves, all laid out in boxes and so fresh they’re practically glowing. This is what I remember loving about New York: the little markets here, how even in the winter they have the feel of an abundant summer, with their array of bagels and multigrain breads, olives, crackers, smoked salmon, and cheese, all there, just beckoning. In my years of living in New Hampshire, I’d forgotten how the city in winter smells like buildings and pavement and car exhaust and wool coats, and not simply like the hard, cold, metallic air of snow and ice and pine trees. It feels wonderful just to walk down the sidewalk, passing people who are rushing by me and who don’t know the first thing about who I am and couldn’t care less.

Some days now, before I go back to Sophie, I permit myself this: to sit in the sunshine in the park, watching and remembering. It feels as though I could almost walk back to the past if I wanted to, find it all still waiting for me here. I have walked these streets with my heart cracked wide open, stood in these outdoor markets, handling tangerines and grapefruits, when all I wanted was impossible love instead of being content with the warm, round citrusy nourishment that was being offered to me.

One day, lying on the bed next to Sophie, I tell her that I’ve realized New Hampshire is all about settlement and barricading yourself—even its games involve hard pucks and face masks. But in New York, even in winter, the whole place is open and filled with possibility. It’s the energy here, I say, the way it runs beneath the surface of everything.

She laughs. “That’s not energy you hear. It’s the rumbling from the subway, you nut.”

“Yes, even that!” I say. “It’s like there’s a whole other world you can step right into. You could lose yourself here, blend into a crowd and never have to face up to your old life.”

“Mom,” she says. “When you talk like that, I can’t help but get the unsettling idea that you don’t like your old life.”

“Sophie,” I say very carefully. “Sophie, you
do
remember what your father is like, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?” she says.

I laugh. “Now, I know that he’s a very good man, and that you idealize him somewhat, but you do remember that he can be a very black-and-white thinker, don’t you? Remember the time you had a big fight with your best friend in middle school, after she said all those mean things about you?”

She nods.

“And I thought you should wait a few days until things calmed down and then go over to her house and talk to her? But your father was certain that she’d crossed an unforgivable line and that you should never speak to her again.”

“Oh, yeah. He said ‘Think smart—why would you want somebody like that in your life at all?’ and
then
he said it was even a good thing that it had happened, because now I could see the kind of person she was, so I would know never ever to trust her.” She shakes her head.

“Yeah. I’m just saying. Good man, on the side of right, against all that’s wrong, but sometimes …”

She laughs.

“And, well now that it’s only him and me in the house, all that
rightful
thinking and goodness has nowhere to go but at me. It can be a bit much.”

ONE DAY I go back home after a morning in the park and Google Jeremiah.

Not that Googling is a crime, but it is a ridiculous thing to do, and of course once I thought of it, I had to do it anyway. I type his name into Sophie’s computer while she’s in the bathroom, praying that I can find out something quickly and can slide back over to the Baby Gap site before she reappears.

The pages take a long time to load. Here is what I learn in the three minutes I have: He is no longer on the faculty at Columbia. He lived in Sweden for a while. His books are not doing particularly well on amazon.com. He might now be in New York.

He is a widower.

I take a deep breath.

Sophie comes back into the room, looking like a woman from the Renaissance with her pale skin and upswept hair. She is smiling when she gives me the thumbs-up sign; still no blood. The baby is staying in place.

I casually click over to a census report on the population of New York City. More than 8 million people live here, I tell her. Can you imagine the chances of running into any one person you know?

“It’s infinitesimal,” she says.

[ten]

1977

A
nd so here we are, at Jeremiah.

That
part of things. The wonderful, awful, scary part.

Jeremiah was married, a married man with toddlers. Let me just get that out of the way first, because that was almost the main thing about him. It defined all else, just the same as his slightly curly, glossy dark hair and those magnetic blue eyes, his loutish smile, and the fact that he was in his early thirties and was already a college professor because of some brilliant study he’d done years before.

Carly, his wife, was tall and willowy and wore leotards and leggings with flowy diaphanous dancer’s skirts, and yes, little ballet-type slippers, the kind that lace up the calves. Her naturally red hair was always in a careful, tight bun with tendrils, and she had a flat, almost concave stomach and a thin, nervous face that registered what she was thinking all the time. She was jittery and drank lots of coffee, and to me she was a glamorous older woman who had already had a successful career as a dancer. Now she, too, was in her thirties and the mother of adorable twins and married to a man whom people regarded as The Great One. She didn’t need anything else to complete her, while at the end of that summer, just having turned twenty-one and now married, I was practically fresh from the primordial ooze, still made of jelly, unformed and undirected, with my wounded heart hanging back, in California.

I was hurting for David, who woke up in the hospital stunned to find himself so altered. At first he didn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all my parents, who fought as though he could not possibly hear them, and as though, in this semiprivate hospital room, with both of their children in attendance, they could refight once and for all the battles that had consumed them their entire marriage. It would have taken a team of psychiatrists to sort it all out, I said to David when I got permission to take him outside one day. I pushed him in a wheelchair to a courtyard, where we sat and talked. We were hiding from the drone of the daytime television shows in the hallways of the hospital, the smell of the food service trays, the squeak of nurses’ shoes on the tile floors, the chipper voices of the therapists who came bouncing into David’s room only to retreat like wilted daisies upon exposure to our family drama.

We were so sad, but we couldn’t say we were sad because my father was stone-faced and grim with anger and might blow up, and my mother was swollen with tears that would leak out if you so much as looked in her direction. Everything that happened between the four of us in that room felt as if it was because of an unstated agreement we’d signed on to without knowing it. We seethed and roiled and put on a good face for David, who was the most dejected of all but who was in the process of growing the hard shell he would need to keep living.

That is what I know now. Then all I knew was that I needed to go every day to the hospital and try to navigate my way through all these muddled feelings, which was a lot like weaving together blackened ropes along with strands of hope and togetherness and trying to come out with a nice tapestry that said our family would be all right.

The good parts—and there were some—were when I got David off alone and some of his hard tortoise self came off and there was the pink wound underneath that we could look at and actually even laugh about. We would go to our hidden courtyard, a jungly, overgrown place an orderly had shown us, where the staff went to smoke dope and hide from their supervisors when they were on breaks.

“I think it’s symbolic that this is a jungle, since we’re obviously under attack by family napalm,” I said to him one evening there. “It’s like Vietnam in there with Edie and Howard together.”

He said, “
I
think it’s symbolic that it’s a jungle, because if I have to stay in this place much longer, I’m going to plant some seeds here and grow my own marijuana.”

We both laughed. His eye was all bandaged up, and he had some idea that when they took the dressings off, the eyeball itself was going to roll onto the floor. But he thought that was funny, too, once we were outside. He had a deep, rumbly, wet laugh now, as though the accident had dislodged something in his respiratory system and he was filled with fluids. He said he wanted two things: for me to get the hell out of here and go to New York and start my life, and for me to arrange to get him some weed. Could I do that? Maybe go to the nurses’ station and look around for an orderly who looked like he might be stoned? “Just stand there and watch until you find the one who’s the most incompetent and who can’t seem to stop laughing, even when he’s emptying bedpans,” he said. “He’ll know how to get me some weed.”

We laughed ourselves sick over that idea, and then he said, “But really. As soon as you can, you’ve got to go. Go. I mean it. Grant’s waiting for you. You’re
married
, for God’s sake. But first, the weed. A lot of it.”

I scored him two ounces of weed from one of his stoner friends and got to New York on a smoggy, humid Thursday afternoon, four weeks after Grant had arrived. I was an unholy mess. Grant met me at the airport, and I was so tense that he had to unbend my fingers to release them from my carry-on bag so he could hug me.

We had a beer at the airport bar, and Grant kept squeezing my arm and talking about The Great Man and Carly and how cool they were. They were so happily married and the twins were too cute for words, he said. He had bags under his eyes, and he only looked lively when he talked about them. When I asked him about himself and his classes, he couldn’t think of anything to say. It was, you know, what you’d think, he said. The students were smart. The classes were hard. The Great Man had told him it was always like that at first; you had to work twenty-hour days when you were new and try your damnedest to keep one step ahead of the work you had to do and convince everybody, the students and the university and the department, that you could make it. But then once you had it all under control, once you’d proven yourself, life would get better. He spread his hands wide and cleared his throat. The academic life was going to be harder than he ever thought, but he was ready for the challenge. He kept saying little cliché things about how you had to work 110 percent.

I’d been through so much, I couldn’t even relate to him. My husband, I kept thinking.
Husband
. Hadn’t that sudden wedding just been something of a joke? I realized I didn’t know anything about him at all, not really.

The beer—it was his first beer since we’d been together in Kansas, but I insisted he drink it because I needed him loose—oiled him up only a little, and he said he was relieved that I had come back to him. His eyes were glassy behind those giant lenses. He said he hadn’t been sure I would actually ever join him. His hands drummed on the tabletop, keeping up a nervous beat.
Oh
, I thought.
Look at that. He’s been biting his fingernails
.

“So how’s your family?” he asked, then looked past me at the television set on the wall, which was just then showing the Santa Ana winds in California, with palm trees whipping around and particles of ash raining down on the landscape like snow. “Bet you’re glad you got out of that little weather pattern,” he said, taking out his wallet to pay the bill.

I didn’t even look at the screen. A wave of sadness hit me at the mention of California. “I wonder if David will ever walk again,” I said. “He’s lost so much.”

“But he’s better off than they thought at first. At least there’s that.”

“But he’s so much worse off than he was before he got shot. That’s the thing that makes me feel so sorry for him. I can’t help thinking about everything he lost.”

“I understand,” he said. “But it seems to me you’ve got to stop that.” He gave me a sad, kind smile. “You really can’t do much about it. He’s got his own life.”

“Well,” I said, and paused. “He doesn’t have much of one left.”

“No, no, no. I don’t think that’s the way to look at this,” he said, and I felt like I was being given a peek into this part of his personality that was always going to be so hard for me to deal with: the part that says you can’t look at bad stuff. Everything has to be turned to the good. “How does it help David if everybody is just wallowing in pity for him? He doesn’t want people to feel sorry for him. We need to cheer him on, let him know that bad things happen but he can recover.”

What if we just need to cry with him?
I thought. But I didn’t say anything. Grant took my hand and kissed every one of my fingers. “Do you know something? When I get up to talk in front of my classes, I feel like my whole face has turned bright red. And then I think about you, and I say to myself, ‘Well, Annabelle loves me, so I can’t be all bad.’” He dipped his head and smiled at me shyly in a way that stopped my heart.

“I’m sure you’re great,” I said. “You’ve always been a wonderful teacher.”

We laughed uncomfortably because we both remembered then that I had no idea what kind of teacher he was. In fact, I’d never seen him teach anything, not one thing. He steered me out of the bar, through the airport, whispering that he was going to have his way with me as soon as we got to the apartment. We kissed for a long time in the car, and he ran his fingers along my cheeks and chin and gazed at me. “The thing is, when we have relations at home, we’re going to have to be ultra, ultra quiet. I don’t even think we can breathe hard without the twins waking up.”

“Did you really just say ‘relations’?” I said.

“Yes.” He looked confused. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess that for me, as somebody who’s just come from hanging out with my
relations
, it doesn’t exactly make me think sexy thoughts when I hear that word. Couldn’t we call it something juicy, like … oh, I don’t know … 
fucking?”

He grinned. “I’d forgotten how earthy you are.”

“Will we get our own place soon?” I said. “Because, to tell you the truth, I don’t think I can fuck without breathing hard.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m at school all the time, but you can look for places for us. And, Annabelle?”

“What?”

He had a pained smile on his face, and he touched my nose. “Could we, you know,
not
call it fucking? Please? That word just has a bad connotation for me. If you don’t want to say ‘relations,’ then what if we called it ‘making love’? How would that be?”

“Making love sounds nice,” I said, and I felt immediately shy around him. He was such an innocent, such a simple, good-hearted innocent who came from a planet where people were circumspect, didn’t say bad words in public and thought that families were meant to stay together and that when you went to bed with someone, it was only out of love. And he loved me. Of course, that was probably only because he hadn’t realized yet what he was in for. But still, I might be okay with him, if I tried really hard.

That night after we crept into the dark, sleeping apartment and made love, I lay awake for hours, listening to the sounds of sirens Dopplering down the street, people walking by outside laughing and talking all through the night, doors slamming elsewhere in the building. How did people live under these conditions? Did no one ever sleep? With the streetlights outside, it was almost as bright as day in the bedroom where we slept. The room was filled with books about feminism and dancing, and about feminist dancing. My head kept bumping into a box labeled “Jeremiah texts.”

Before the sun was quite up, I woke to the sound of screaming and then a child saying, “Owie, owie, owie!” and a woman saying, “Stop it now, both of you!” Then there was a heated argument about whether this particular injury required a Band-Aid—the woman didn’t appear to think so, but the child was adamant—and then, as I put the pillow over my head, I heard a détente of sorts: a flesh-colored Band-Aid could be applied, but this injury, whatever it was, did not merit one of the colored Band-Aids that were for real troubles. I fell back to sleep, but then, in what seemed like moments except that the sun was now shining in the window, there was the sound of walls and ceiling coming down, and the refrigerator opening and closing right at my head, it seemed, and the same woman insisting, “No, no, no. I told you that you can’t put water on your granola. Granola is for
milk
. And you can’t pour the milk. No, no,
no!
Put that down. I have to do it!” And then she cried out, “Jeremiah, God damn it, will you
do
something here? I’ve got to get out of here, and these kids are
killing
me!” The twins were apparently dismantling the kitchen, board by board from the sound of it, and I heard a man saying, “Can’t you just speak in a regular voice? It only makes things worse when you get hysterical about every little thing. You should put the milk in a little pitcher and let him pour it out himself.”

“Maybe you have time for that, but I don’t have
time
to clean it up after he pours it all over the place!” the woman said. “And did you bring up the laundry? Brice smells like he has a poop, and I changed the last four poops, so it’s your turn.”