The Stuff That Never Happened (23 page)

You and me in bed
, he says. And something electric goes through me, which he notices, with some amusement. I see the satisfaction in his eyes. Nobody is going to tell
him
that I fell in love with Grant McKay.

“The love story part,” he says. “Did it … well, did it make you remember?”

I’d read the book in the library, I tell him. I’d take the children for story hour, and then as soon as they were settled, I’d go upstairs to the place I’d hidden it in the stacks. Sometimes someone would have found it and taken it back to the New Fiction section, where just anyone could see it and check it out. I don’t tell him that once I couldn’t find it for three days, and I was worried that somebody had taken it out and I’d have to wait—and what if it was a person like me who keeps books for however long I want to? But then I found it again. Somebody had shelved it wrong. I remember the day I read the ending, when the couple broke up. It hadn’t been that way when he’d read it to me before. I’d had to lean against the shelves because my heart was beating so hard.

He’s smiling. “Us in bed. At—what was her name?—Lynn’s house?”

Oh yes. “Linnea.”

“Ah, Linnea. Saint among women. How many toasts have I drunk in my life to Linnea and her lovely bed. I still mention her nightly in my prayers of gratitude.”

“But with the wrong name, apparently.”

“In prayers of gratitude, it’s the essence that counts. Don’t you know that?” He takes a sip of his coffee and whispers, “I love the idea of you reading my book in the stacks while your children hear stories downstairs. I wish I could have known that was happening. I wish I could have reached you.”

“Yes. Me, too, you.”

I know it’s all over my face how much I have held on to him, that he might even know about the dreams I’ve had of him at night, about the way his face would suddenly appear before me at any time at all through the years—while changing diapers, washing dishes, even making love to Grant.

He grins at me and pushes his hair back off his forehead and sighs. The novel embarrasses him now, he says, with all that sentimentality. He can’t bear to read it. “It was, ah, a symptom of the times, shall we say?” he says. “All that bullshit trauma, the sabbatical, the difficulty in the marriage, the adjustment to having little kids rampaging through the house, dismantling the place brick by brick. You know, I was about as crazy as a person can be and still be at large. Those years … I mean, what was I thinking?” He holds up his hands, appealing to the heavens, and says, “I was stupid.”

I sip my tea and feel a flush spreading across me. This is a dance we’re doing. I’ve thrown down the gauntlet by saying I’m in love with Grant, and Jeremiah is setting out to show me that he can still get to me. Just watch, in a moment, he’ll punish me by saying that I, too, was just a symptom of his stupidity, and then after a few more minutes of strained but otherwise polite and ambiguous conversation, we’ll say good-bye and I won’t see him again. But at least I’ll know how to file away that whole period of my life. The good part will be that I won’t need to hold on to those dreams that I realize I have always seen as a kind of message from my unconscious, from my soul, this guarded place that I have let Jeremiah be in charge of.

But the bad part will be that everything will have been diminished, made small.

Which, damn it, it was. It was small. I have been so idiotic, seeing those days writ so large, giving them such importance. Calling that affair
my soul
. Going to the library to read that book, even Googling his name—all that was making more of it than it really was, a ridiculous dalliance he took on when he was screwed up beyond belief and was rebelling. The truth was, I was a little shit of a wife, a cheating spoiled baby who luckily found herself forgiven by her husband. And I should get down on my knees and thank my lucky stars that I got out so unscathed. Run back now.
Now
.

I feel for my purse strap and am about to stand up and make some excuse when he leans forward and touches my arm. His eyes see down to the heart of me.

“Annabelle, I just want you to know that the loss of you was something I never got over. It was the worst mistake I ever made. I may not get another chance to tell you.”

Don’t look. Look away. Now
.

“But you really are happy, aren’t you?” he says. “I mean, happy in that overarching sense.”

I nod and then shrug. Shake my head. Yes. No. I can’t speak.

He’s smiling, still leaning so close to me that it’s all I can do not to reach over and run my hands along that stubbled jawline of his that used to make me so crazy. “It actually helps me, knowing that you didn’t suffer so much after you spun away from me that last day.” He shakes his head, puts down his coffee cup, and sighs. “For such a long time, I guess I wasn’t sure we were going to survive all that love.”

I put my hand up to shield my eyes as tears start to fall, and he says, “Oh, no! Oh, don’t, please, please …”

I jump up and pull my hand away. “Stop. Let’s not go into all that now! I can’t talk about it,” I say, more loudly than I realized, and I can’t help it, I’m crying now for real. “I don’t want to cry,” I whisper hoarsely. Jeremiah stands up, too, and leans over and dabs at my face with the napkin he’s holding, and I jerk away from him and say, “
No
!” Too loudly.

The man with the muffin looks up. His paper is practically touching my hip.

I put my hands over my face.

“No, talk about it. Tell me. If this is the only time we’ll have, we need to talk about it,” says Jeremiah in a low, urgent voice, standing next to me and pulling me toward him. “Let’s get out of here, okay? Come to my place.”

“I don’t want—I can’t leave with you,” I say. “I need to go—to go back to Sophie’s. I want to get away.” I must look so foolish, with mascara going everywhere on my face, and my voice so shaky and ragged.

“But you’re not okay. Stay with me a little longer. Let’s talk this through. This is our only chance. Here. Why don’t we walk?”

Outside, the sun is weak and watery, and there are puddles everywhere with little chips of ice still in them. “Let’s just take one of those walks like we used to,” he says. “Nothing heavy or sad. Remember that year we pushed the kids in their strollers for miles and miles while we tried to figure out your career and my book and why we didn’t want to do the things that everybody thought we were supposed to do?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Those walks maybe saved my life.”

“Mine, too.”

“Yeah. And look at us, here again. On a one-day-only free pass. Amazing, really, when you think about it.”

So I go with him. We walk for blocks and blocks, and it’s crazy how familiar and right it seems. Like we’re outside of time. On vacation from real life. He takes my hand, and that’s okay, too. We keep smiling at each other, without talking, and I can’t get over it, that I’m here with him and how funny he makes everything. It’s okay, really. He’s the same, and we don’t have to wade back through all that shit; it’s enough to be here with him this minute, and that’s what I want to tell him. That we really don’t need anything more than this because it’s enough to get me through the next twenty-six years and however many months and weeks and hours, and I’m wondering if he really did figure that up or was that something he just made up, but when I turn to him to say that, he stops walking and pulls me over next to the building, and then his mouth is covering mine and we are kissing like it’s 1979 and not one second has passed.

He tastes of coffee and sweetness and something that is unmistakably familiar and known and
real
, more real than anything else I’ve been through since. He is in my blood; he has
always
been in my blood. And it’s like all the times before when we kissed in public and everything went all hallelujah in my head, those times in the park when we took the kids on the swings, and the times when we raced home and jumped on each other in bed, or tore off to Linnea’s house, laughing as we unlocked her door and, often as not, falling down on the floor in the entryway, kissing and rolling around on her Turkish rug and never making it to the bedroom. And maybe it’s been only an hour since those days have passed, and these are the kisses that have lived on in those dreams—and maybe they
are
dreams; maybe I’ll wake up and think,
Oh, I had one of those Jeremiah dreams, but this one was in a Starbucks!
And so when he says, “I live not far from here; will you come home with me?” I am helplessly ready to go with him, because I am no longer the sad Annabelle who has run away from home, I am the old Annabelle, and I need this. It is, in fact, rightfully
mine
.

I am about to say all the yeses that are in my head—but then my cell phone rings in the pocket of my coat, blaring out the first notes of “Thriller,” which Sophie thought would be a funny trick, and I jump in midair as though I’ve been caught and am plunged right back in the present.

“Uh-oh, pregnancy alert? Could this be it?” says Jeremiah under his breath, close to me, but we pull apart as I take the phone out of my pocket. It’s not Sophie, thank God. It’s Nicky, and I shrug at Jeremiah and say,
“Other
kid,” and answer it.

He’s talking through a crackly connection; either that or he’s eating something. His voice is maddeningly lazy and casual. It brings me back to reality. “Hey, Mom. I’ve got a question. Did Dad pay for next semester already?”

This is the kid—it’s funny, really—who had an unerring sixth sense for knowing when Grant and I were making love. Let Grant so much as touch my breast in the middle of the night, and there would be Nicholas, materializing from out of nowhere in his fleecy sleeper, sucking his thumb and demanding to be put between us in bed. “He’s returning to the scene of his origins,” Grant used to say. “It’s like the swallows returning to Capistrano.”

And now here he is, driven by some blind instinct to preserve the sanctity of our marriage, perhaps. I can’t think. “Why are you asking me this?” I say. “What’s wrong?”

“I dunno. I’m just thinking maybe I’d like to take some time off, go traveling or something,” he says. “If he didn’t pay, I was thinking maybe I’ll just take the money he was going to pay and go to Europe next semester. Backpacking. Doesn’t that sound cool?”

“Wait. Backpacking? Instead of college?” I say. I roll my eyes at Jeremiah and he laughs. He’s leaning against the wall with his arms folded, watching me be a mom. “Why don’t you just go backpacking this summer and then go back to school in the fall like you’re supposed to?”

“Because I’m not getting anything out of college. It’s stupid. My classes are boring and I don’t want to be here,” Nicky says. “I thought you’d be the one who’d get that. You get me. Dad doesn’t.”

“Listen, sweetie, can we talk about this later? This isn’t such a great time.”

“Where are you? You sound like you’re in the middle of a train station or something.”

“Nope, I’m just outside on the street,” I tell him. “Listen. Why don’t I call you tonight?”

“But, Mom, I’m supposed to sign up for classes now, and I really, really do
not
want to come back to this place. I’m just wasting Dad’s money here. Tell him that. He hates the idea of wasting money.”

“Listen, just go sign up anyway. We’ll talk about this on spring break. You are coming for break, aren’t you?” Jeremiah detaches himself from the wall he’s leaning on and wanders a few feet away, giving me some space. He stands and looks at a poster hanging on a little street kiosk as if it’s the most fascinating thing in the world. It’s such a luxury, getting to observe him without him looking at me. If I squint, he looks exactly the same as he did years ago—same weight, same way of walking, same
whatever
it was that used to drive me so mad for him. I’m grateful for the distance, I realize in surprise. This moment to think and breathe. I feel grounded again.

Nicky is whining about how his father is going to give him a hard time if he leaves school. He says Grant has never understood him, that I’m the only one who can help him.

“Well, he
is
a professor,” I say. “He believes in education.”

Jeremiah puts his hands in his pockets and rocks backward on his heels, not looking at me. He has a thoughtful, concerned look on his face as he watches a street person lurching down the street. I see him reach out and steady the man as he comes closer, see the way he reaches into his pocket and hands the man something.

The word
kryptonite
rises in my head. Jeremiah is my kryptonite. I am breathing better now that I’m even a few feet away from him. My strength is returning.

“Backpacking
is
an education!” Nicky says. “You gotta tell him that for me. You can make him see.
You
didn’t finish college, and
you
did all right.”

I should have postponed this conversation, but I didn’t—because it hits me that I wanted this distance. I am actually prolonging this, hanging on to the phone as if for dear life. “First of all, honey,” I say, “you and I are different people, and second of all, the times are different. And I’ve always wished I went back. It was a mistake.”

I am not going to sleep with Jeremiah. I know that now.

“Get out of here,” Nicky is saying. “You’re like a
major
artist doing books! You got what you wanted without college!”

“It’s not the way you think. I didn’t do exactly what I wanted. Let’s talk more about this later. This really is a terrible connection.”

“All right,” he says. “But if you talk to Dad …”

There’s a cluster of static and we get disconnected. But for some reason, I don’t take the phone away from my ear. I pretend that I’m still connected, and I walk over to Jeremiah in the sudden blankness of silence from the cell phone world, and I blow him a kiss and do one of those fluttery finger waves, point to the phone, make a sad face, blow another kiss, and mouth the words “I’ve got to go”—and then I walk away.

It’s that easy to just … walk away. Who knew you could do that?