While I Was Gone (41 page)

And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets.

That became lies. I thought of Dana, who loved what she thought of as my dignity. And had never known my real name. I thought of my daughters, who found me elusive. In some sense, I suppose, unknowable. Of Sadie, who couldn’t believe in me now. Of my husband, whom I’d betrayed. Who seemed to have been willing to think, if only briefly, that I was capable of even worse than that. Who was so cut off from me now that I had wondered if we shouldn’t end our marriage.

I ought to ask her a question or two, I realized.

“Did you know her?” I asked after a moment.

“Daddy’s wife?”

“Early on I met her a few times. But she was very ill by then. Not herself.” Idly she picked up a puzzle piece and moved it around in the air over the clumps of at ached pieces she was working on.

“Well,” she said, “maybe by then being ill was what being herseymeant. I don’t know. All I know is your father felt he’d lost her. He’d lost her already, years before she died.”

Then she said, “Look here, isn’t this something that goes with your stuff over there?” and held the piece out to me.

That night I sat up by the fire after my mother had gone to bed.

The students were drifting in and out of the kitchen, geting late night snacks and drinks, coming in to talk to me briefly, and it struck me with some amusement that my mother was, in a way, living the life I’d run away for so many years ago—unencumbered, free, in an easy, relaxed household among other unencumbered, free people. I called up her face, her iron-blue eyes, her age-freckled skin with the finest of lines distributed evenly on it everywhere, like a delicate mesh laid over her features. I marveled again at her innocent secret, at her impulse to tell it. After all these years, I thought. And then heard Detective Ryan’s pleased voice talking about Eli, about killers who’ve gone free, “They have to tell,” he’d said.

Well, apparently so.

But why? What is it that comes from the telling?

Some of it must be relief, of course. A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.

I thought about Eli and saw him again in the library, the raised hand, the shy smile—which I had read as corrupt, and corrupting, as an attempt to include me somehow in his guilt. But what was it he had said when I asked him why he had told, why he had chosen me?

“I

need a kind of forgiveness from you.” It was what Mother had needed, why not Eli?

So maybe I misunderstood him that day in the library.

Maybe he was saying only please through that dancing slice of light, and in return he saw me saying only no. Maybe my turning away from him then is what hardened him, what made it possible for him to defend himself to the police by accusing me. Because I had judged him, refused him.

Because he no longer saw me as the generous, mature person he’d understood me to be.

I thought of my mother, asking me, “We’re the same, aren’t we?” It hasn’t changed us in your eyes to know this. And the comfort she seemed to take in knowing that it hadn’t. I thought of my blurting out to Daniel what I’d done, my hope that he could somehow love me still.

It seems we need someone to know us as we are—with all we have done—and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight, Know this about me, and yet love me. Please.

But it’s so much to ask of other people! Too much. Daniel makes it easier on those around him, God is the one he asks to know him as he is, to see him whole and love him still. But for us others it seems there must be a person to redeem us to ourselves. It isn’t enough, apparently, to know oneself. To forgive oneself, in secret.

I crushed the fire into embers and replaced the screen.

And as I mounted the stairs and undressed, as I slid under the cold, heavy covers (“Flat as a pancake till morning!” my mother used to say), felt, I think for the first time, a kind of pity for Eli Mayhew.

I SPENT THE AFTERNOON BEFORE I LEFT PULLING THE SODden leaf mulch off Mother’s flower beds in the front yard. I worried that it was too early, that there might still be a frost, but she was firm, “Oh, it’s always too early, no matter when you do it, they’re so pale and puny. Too early and too late at the same time. It could get cold again, but on the other hand, it’s not good for them to grow very long in the dark. One of those chores you just hold your nose and do it and hope it comes out all right. Anyway,” she said, “I always do it by tax time, and that’s nearly upon us now.”

It was the first slightly warm day we’d had, and I sat in the pale sunlight on the damp ground. The plants were up—she was right-poking their snub noses out of the wet dirt, often having pierced the leaves, so that I had to pull each one off carefully or risk spliKing their fragile tips. They were white and looked oddly naked, their secret growing suddenly exposed like this. They seemed at first to shrink and recoil, to dry up a little in the light and air. But even as I worked, they were greening slightly too.

The sunlight bore down on my back and warmed me, though my legs and botom were cool and damp. I took off my mother’s gardening gloves after the first few minutes—they made it hard to do the delicate work around the shoots. I shifted from side to side, and then up to my knees, as my hip started to ache. But I loved it also. I felt-for the first time, I think, since I’d heard Eli’s name, since I’d met him again—content to be doing what I was doing. I felt innocently useful.

That night I had a dream. Something in it startled me, and I woke myself, making a small noise, jumping under the heavy layers of blanket. It came to me that it had been about Daniel, though I couldn’t remember what was happening. But I had reached out to touch him just before I woke, and I could still feel it, Daniel’s cool cheek under my fingertips. How real it was! I thought.

And then I recalled the dogs in sleep, the way they suckled and ran and tore at other animals, so real their dream life was to them.

Did they know the difference when they woke? I wondered. Or were they like demented people, who count as experience what they’ve merely dreamed?

As I lay there, I realized I was doing just that. Because I was happy, happy with just my dream of Daniel, the vague sleeping memory of him. I’d brought him to life, Lying in the dark in my mother’s house.

I’d felt him and touched him, he’d come back to me. And for that moment in my half-sleeping, half-waking state, the joy that gave me felt like enough.

ONCE THE PLANE HAD LANDED AT LOGAN AND WE’d SLOWLY filed off, I headed downstairs along with the rest of our troop, toward the baggage claim area, dragging my rolling bag behind me. Ahead of me on the escalator, a little boy of about four was trying to tell knock knock jokes to his mother, geting them wrong every time, jumping from “who’s there?” directly to the punch line. She laughed politely at each one, though, which was enough for him.

“That was a good one,” he’d say.

“Wasn’t it, Mom? That was a good one.”

I crossed the wide stone floor downstairs to the wall of windows and revolving doors. Outside, I could see the cars parked and doubleparked, waiting. And then I saw our car. Leaning against it, with his back against the driver’s side—turned away from me—was Daniel. I negotiated my bag into the revolving door and made it through. The noise outside was deafening—a plane starting its takeoff.

The dogs were in the car. I could see them barking and jumping wildly around, perhaps in response to all the noise, perhaps at the people passing by, too close to their territory. Daniel was turned almost in profile to me, watching a group of travelers boarding a bus pulled up to the middle island of the drive-through area. The scream of the plane was so intense now that he didn’t hear me come up next to him, he didn’t sense me standing there.

Without asking myself whether I should, whether I could, I lifted my hand to his face and touched it to the flat of his cheek. He startled and turned to me. After the slightest pause, his arms rose in what seemed a nearly automatic response to embrace me.

We pressed together, hesitantly at first. Then I felt him suddenly grip me hard—Daniel!—and pull me fiercely against him. His hands slid up and down my back, I felt his tensed strength. The moment went on and on for me, dizzying in its timelessness. I was drinking in with my body the feel of his, and I was breathless with relief, with the sweet familiarity of our touch. This, I thought, holding him. This, here.

Slowly my breathing evened.

But before we stepped apart again, I made myself register consciously the expression that had passed for a moment over his face as he moved forward to hold me, a sadness, a visible regret.

At what? At this giving over, I suppose. This capitulation. To me.

To us.

And I haven’t forgo well I think of it often, and I find a kind of tender sorrow rising in me for him. For the distance he had to cross, the place he’d had to come from, to yield to me. For his giving up some hardness in himself—maybe a hardness that had surprised him or pleased him in a way—to be what I knew again. To be the one who had to forgive me.

SO WE RESUME IT, SLOWLY PICKING UP THE ONGOING CONversation that was our life together. We talk. We talk. And the words make our silences easier—they’re the current that runs under them.

We make love, too, a little shyly at first, as though there were something embarrassing or shameful about starting again after not having done it in so long.

And there come more and more those other moments of touching, the ones I have most deeply yearned for, I realize. Daniel’s hand, resting on my shoulder as he looks over it to see what I’m doing, what I’m making for dinner. On my arm, “Here, I’ll carry that.” On my thigh-a claim, an assertion, You’re back. I’m back. We’re home again. I know you.

Summer comes, and we walk again at night, trailing the dogs on the worn paths. In the coKoned dark, the words seem easeful, seem like the spoken version of our bodies’ bumping or touching, all part of the same remaking of what it means to be together, to touch each other, to love.

Still, there are things that startle me. New things. Some small, barely worth noticing, perhaps. I am talking at the dinner table one night, happy to be back in our old pa tern maybe going on too long, and I see that he has gone away, that his face has closed in and clouded, somehow. And because I can’t bear to ask—to be told-what’s wrong, I chatter on, ignoring it, until he comes back, until the moment of darkness passes.

Others more dramatic, Leaving late for work, I’m sliding behind the steering wheel of my car when I notice Daniel. He’s deep in the barn, in shadow, just stepping out of his off fice to come to the house.

He’s seen me in the car, and he’s stopped there, waiting. He doesn’t realize I’ve seen him. He doesn’t want me to see him. Maybe he’s been thinking about all of it again and he doesn’t want to have to talk to me, to have to be loving. Maybe he just wants to hold on to something he’s been thinking about, working on. At any rate, he stands still, barely visible, a pale ghost in the shadows, and he waits for me to be gone.

So I go. Because this is my task, as I see it, and I’m trying to learn it well. I’m trying to accept the changes I made when I didn’t intend to. I’m trying to allow for this ordinary distance between us. To let him not want me sometimes. Sometimes not to need him. So that when it comes, I can love it more, the approach, the turning back to what we do want most in each other, what we do need.

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I SEE ELI AROUND TOWN EVERY NOW AND THEN. ELI ALONE,

or together with Jean. Once, they were jogging by the side of the road as I was driving by. This was early in the summer, one of those long June evenings when the sun sits forever at earth’s edge and day goes on and on in its warm last light. I didn’t recognize them at first.

They were just silhouetes ahead of me, a man and a woman, not young, but strong, fit, in good shape, their stride matched perfectly, the legs lean and muscled. Closer, I saw they were my age, and I envied them their bodies, the nice high kick behind each stroke.

And then, just before I pulled abreast of them, I knew who they were and I turned my face away. In the rearview mirror, the sun was full upon then. They were like costumed twins in their bright running clothes, their skin daubed orange in the light, their matching short hair silvered. I watched them grow smaller and smaller on the roadside. They hadn’t noticed me.

I saw him by himself once at the hardware store. I was bent over a bin counting out galvanized nails, and I looked up and there he was, in shirtsleeves and old khakis, his hair grown out a liKle, standing at the counter asking about paints—oil versus latex. I turned and went into another aisle until he’d left.

But it reminded me of something. I stopped in at the library on my way home, though Daniel was waiting for those nails. I went to the computer room and called up again the newspaper image of all of us leaving the police station after Dana’s death. There we were, young and grief-stricken and angry.

Eli and I were the only ones not wearing coats.

He walked by our house on the Fourth of July, as did half the town, following the parade. I’d been siting on the front steps with Shorty, the door open behind me. When I saw Eli, Eli and Jean, I stepped back into the darkness of the front hall to wait until they’d passed, until that part of the parade—the antique cars, the firemen throwing candy to the avid children—had gone by. They were with another couple I’ve seen around town a bit but don’t know. They were talking and laughing, Jean and the woman carrying mugs of coffee as they walked along b in the dappled sunlight under the old, wide trees.

They’re making friends, then, sew ling in. My wish that they move away will, apparently, not be granted.

But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to pUt at risk everything that’s dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be—even about yourself—may not be.