The First Husband (22 page)

“Exactly,” he said. “And I don’t think they actually killed him.”

I shook my head. “Man, those were great.”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “Jesse would grab the candy and be out of the store in fifteen seconds flat. And I’d still be standing there, just staring at the candy shelf for as long as my mother shopped. They’d play these old records in the store . . . the Beatles. The Beach Boys. Billie Holiday. So my mother thought I wanted to listen to the music, but really I couldn’t decide. I’d pick up something pretty great, put it back down, pick up something else. And just when Emily would call out that I was out of time, Jesse screaming through the window for me just to get some more Pop Rocks, I’d panic, as only a six-year-old can, and end up picking something pretty awful.”

“Like Fun Dip?”

“On several occasions, yes.”

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

He smiled, giving me a small laugh. Then he looked right at me.

“You shouldn’t take that job, Annie,” he said, solid and firm. “And I’m not saying that because of me. Or because it’d be difficult to go with you. I would figure out how to, if I thought it was the right thing. For you, for us.”

“Then why are you saying it?”

He shrugged. “Because I’m worried you’ve just convinced yourself you need to go there, and that’s not the same thing as actually wanting to.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

He paused. “You were the one that told me you wanted a different life.”

“Well, I’m not sure my
different
life is entirely realistic,” I said.

“Says who?”

“Says hundreds of ruined photographs,” I said. “Says me not knowing what I’d do with them even if they weren’t. Says this travel column, my spending so much time on the road, all of it being the only life I’ve ever known.”

He looked at me, not as if this was completely unclear, but as if this type of clarity wasn’t of much use to him. It made me feel lonely, especially after feeling understood again just a few hours before by someone who shouldn’t be understanding me at all anymore.

“I can’t just become someone else, Griffin,” I said, trying again.

“Who’s talking about you becoming someone else?” he said. “I’m talking about you becoming more like yourself.”

I leaned back, away from him.
More like myself.
This was the worst part. I didn’t know why I couldn’t get there.

“That’s the thing,” he said. “That’s why I started thinking about the Pop Rocks story. I used to be so frustrated that Jesse knew exactly what he wanted. That he could just be happy with it . . . really content. I never thought I’d be built that way. And then it changed.”

“When?” I asked.

He gave me a smile. “When did we meet, again?”

I smiled back, and then looked down. “That’s not true,” I said.

“No, not exactly,” Griffin said. “But that’s not what I’m saying anyway. I’m saying it took a long time to figure out it wasn’t about me finding my version of Pop Rocks.”

“What was it about?”

He stood up, taking his mug with him. “It was about learning to leave the store before time was up,” he said.

Then he leaned down, for one more second, to kiss me on the cheek. Like that was something we did.

“Take the job, Annie,” he said, into my ear. “Go to London.”

I looked up as he pulled back, moving away from me.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Didn’t you just say that I shouldn’t go? Didn’t you just get finished saying that?”

He tilted his head, met my eyes. “I just keep wondering, what made Nick think he could just show up here?” he said. “Was that about him, or was it about you?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, which seemed to be the only answer Griffin needed.

Part of me wanted to scream out,
It isn’t about Nick.
But the words wouldn’t come. Because there was another part of me that looked at that antique ring a second too long—that listened to Nick ’s offer a second too long—to know that Nick wasn’t factoring into my confusion. And then, there was the biggest part of me: the part that didn’t think this was about wanting Nick again, at all. But that couldn’t ignore what seeing him made abundantly clear. That I was no closer to being present here. That part of me still craving an exit strategy.

“I don’t know how to explain it, Griffin. I woke up one day and it’s like I’d ended up in a completely new life. I know I chose that, but it doesn’t feel that simple,” I said. “None of it feels simple to me.”

He was already on his way toward the door, he was already on his way away from me. And this wasn’t enough to keep him.

“I can’t fix that for you, Annie,” he said. “I don’t want to spend my life trying to.”

He looked at me for one last second. He didn’t look angry, or upset. He looked clear, certain.

Then he was gone.

T
he next morning I called Peter.

“I think I may have screwed everything up . . .” I said.

I was standing in the kitchen, the house quiet—perfectly peaceful—the first bit of sun hovering over the backyard, over the forest, making the trees shine.

I turned away from the window.

“Peter,” I said, “don’t be mad, but what if I said I think you may be right and I do need to go? To London, I mean?”

The words felt weird on my tongue, waxlike and wrong. Yet, I was able to ignore that—had to ignore that—because I also felt a certain kind of relief, just hearing them, out in the world, ready to do their work.

“My love,” he said. His voice was still husky with sleep. “I’d tell you that you could have waited until seven A.M. to share with me what I already know. It’s seven A.M. for unsurprising news. That is the rule.”

“So it’s not too late to take the job?” I asked.

“Of course it isn’t too late,” he said. “I accepted the position on your behalf last week.”

I looked down at the phone, totally confused. “But how could you do that?” I asked.

“Well, easily,” he said. “Melinda Beckett Martin, the paper’s deputy managing editor, not to mention Caleb Beckett the First’s very favorite niece, called to ask me if you were taking the job, and I told her of course you were. That you couldn’t wait to bring ‘Checking Out’ into international syndication. That despite appearances to the contrary, you weren’t
a fool
.”

“No, but what I’m saying is . . .”

I looked around the kitchen, the twins’ stuff strewn about, Cheryl’s watering can left by the sink; pictured Griffin sleeping upstairs; thought again of all that I was walking away from in the name of not being sure if I had gotten there for the right reasons. And how I could stay.

“How did you know I’d get here?” I asked.

He sighed. Then he sighed again, just in case I missed it.

“My love, how can I say this gently before hanging up on you and going back to sleep?” he said. “I never thought you weren’t going to get here.”

I don’t remember how it happened, exactly—who suggested it first—that we go for a walk. It didn’t matter. Both of us, I think, already knew what was about to happen, and neither of us wanted to be inside of the house when it did.

It was after midnight, the moon steering us away from town—toward farther-off farmland, toward the mountains themselves.

I wasn’t sure what to start by saying, but it felt wrong to make him do it. It felt wrong to do anything but make this as painless as possible. As if, for either of us, that was a possibility.

“Do you remember the conversation we had at the beach that day?” I said. “How I tried to tell you about the best and worst thing about being with Nick? And I said the worst was that I rarely remembered feeling safe?”

“Sure . . .”

“I think that it wasn’t fair to put that on him. That feeling of safe? I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that. And maybe instead of just deciding that Nick was the problem, or the latest in a series of problems, I should have thought about something else.”

“Which is what?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I’m the problem,” I said.

Griffin looked at me. “Maybe he just wasn’t the right person.”

“And what’s the excuse this time?” I said. “The evidence is mounting that I don’t have any idea how to do it, Griffin. Make a home with someone else, feel comfortable in it. And maybe I won’t be able to figure out how, unless I can do that first piece on my own. Make myself safe and comfortable. And then be able to feel like I’m choosing into everything else.”

It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say. But it was close enough. It was close enough for Griffin to understand.

He leaned in and put his arms around me.

“I know it sounds crazy. How can someone figure out how to stay by going again? ” I said, trying to explain it. “But going again is the only way I’ve ever found what I’m looking for.”

He was still holding me there, to him, when he spoke, so I couldn’t see his face.

“I’m not sure we get to, Annie,” he said. “I’m not sure we get to choose when or where we find what we’re looking for.”

I started to say that maybe that was true, maybe our timing was the problem, maybe if we met five years from now, or five months, or five minutes even, but—and I was looking for the
but,
for the way out—I was scared he was saying what he was saying to convince me to stay. To stay right where I was, with him, and try harder.

But then I looked up at him, into his strong and resolved face, and realized he was saying it to let me go.

Which was when he kissed me, one last time. And did.

A
few years after I started “Checking Out,” there was a brief period when we expanded the column to include a supplement called “Late Checkout,” which focused on finding the best deals or free activity alternatives in any city you happened to be visiting. In Montreal, for example, “Late” would recommend that instead of paying for a guided dinner-and-dancing boat tour of the St. Lawrence River, you should consider heading down to the ferry on the Jacques-Cartier Pier, which provided visitors with gorgeous views of Montreal’s downtown, and a great way to visit the old fort at Musée David M. Stewart. All for a fraction of the cost.

But “Late” failed, monumentally and fast, which came as a surprise to me. It had been my idea, and I had thought it was a good one. Who didn’t want to experience a city without breaking the bank? It wasn’t until years later that I realized what we had done wrong. It wasn’t that we provided a free option, it was that we had also provided the
expensive
option beside it. It was in the comparison that we lost the readers. Because all they could see, then, was the option they wouldn’t be taking. All they could think about was what they’d get if they could spend more. About what was about to be missed.

I arrived in London late on a Sunday afternoon—stepping onto the tarmac at Heathrow Airport some seventeen hours before I was scheduled to report to my new office at Buckingham Gate.

For my second major move in less than a year, I’d taken very little with me. Two suitcases, two pictures of Mila, and the phone numbers of two people I knew in the entire country—one number was my new boss’s, Melinda Martin. The other I couldn’t feel good about dialing. Not yet.

The newspaper sent a car service to the airport to fetch me, which provided a far nicer introduction to my new hometown than the Tube would have granted. As a bonus, the sun had started setting over Central London as the driver, Thomas, took the long way to my new abode, pointing out the sites he thought I’d enjoy along the way: Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column; the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace; Waterloo Bridge and Piccadilly Circus. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d been to all of those places before for “Checking Out.” I didn’t ever want to have that kind of heart.

He smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “So what kind of writing do you do for the newspaper?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “Mostly,” I said, “obituaries.”

Thomas took a right down Sloane Street, and I looked out the window at the hustle and bustle of late-day shoppers hurrying in for a chance at final sales, at early-evening restaurantgoers, filling up the good window seats while they still could. Then Thomas hooked a left onto a tiny side street, which looked like, and felt like, an entirely different world. An exceptionally peaceful and intimate one, with just a handful of manicured gardens and small, beautiful buildings greeting me.

“This is lovely,” I said.

“It’s the best block in London,” he said. “Truly. There have been books written about it.”

“I believe it,” I said.

Thomas shut off the ignition, and turned toward me. “And it’s your home,” he said, giving me a bright smile.

I tried to look as happy about that as he did.
You’re choosing this,
I reminded myself. You’re doing the right thing. Or, at least, the only thing.