No one rose as Tyler left the table, which was just as well. At this point, he felt as though he needed a little distance from all of them. He stepped out of the inn and headed home. Maybe he truly would spend some time touching up some photos on his computer, though it could certainly wait until tomorrow or even next week.
It was an okay option if there was nothing good on TV.
When You Went Away
I decided to write fiction because I wanted a forum for talking about things that I couldn’t effectively talk about in my nonfiction, specifically relationships, families, friendships, and love. When You Went Away, my first novel, has plenty of all of these elements. At the center of the story is a man who suddenly finds himself a widower with an infant child and a runaway teenager. In this scene, he has his first extended conversation with a colleague who is going to wind up playing a surprising role in his life.
I began to adjust to my return to work. After a few weeks, I was back into the rhythm of the office. While not nearly as diverting as I had found it to be at other challenging times in my life, the job was something I could focus on for increasingly longer stretches. The deadline of the Christmas catalog lent a certain amount of propulsion to every day.
This wasn’t to say that I didn’t meditate on the pictures of Maureen, Tanya, and Reese every time I sat at my desk, or that I didn’t check in on Lisa more often than was probably necessary (or, from her perspective, welcome). But I began to have ideas again and I could look at the piles of paper in front of me as surmountable.
I was addressing one such pile when Ally Ritten knocked on my door. Until she joined my team, I was only peripherally aware of her. I heard she was smart, others worked well with her, and she came up with some trinket or other for catalogs I hadn’t worked on as a sideline to her primary marketing job. In the first couple of team meetings I had with her, I was impressed with her energy and with how quickly she could run with an idea. She quickly made more of a contribution than anyone else did on the team, and I was sure this was something she would be very good at full time. I’m sure Marshall had some notion of this, which was why he told me to bring her on, though he hadn’t yet suggested anything like a department transfer.
“Hi, am I interrupting?” she said, standing half in and half out of the doorway.
“I’m plodding through some vendor contracts. Please interrupt.”
She sat down across from my desk. “What do you think of cookie jars?”
“Filled or unfilled?”
“Well, that’s sort of where I was going with this. What about offering a set of personalized cookie jars? You know, ‘Mom’s Favorite Cookies’ or ‘Jimmy’s Favorite Cookies.’” This way everyone could always have their cookies in their own cookie jar without compromise or, you know, cross-contamination.”
“Cross-contamination?”
“Oatmeal cookies don’t taste as good if you get Oreo on them.”
“They don’t?”
“I think a certain sector of our audience might believe that to be the case.”
I looked at her skeptically.
“Okay, I’m part of that sector,” she said. She seemed embarrassed by the admission, as though she told me something terribly intimate.
“Oatmeal cookies aren’t allowed to touch Oreos?”
She reddened slightly. “It gets chocolate on them. Then they don’t taste as much like oatmeal anymore.”
“So it would be better if Mom’s cookies and Jimmy’s were segregated.”
She closed her eyes. “This was a stupid idea.”
I laughed. “It’s not a stupid idea. We sell tens of thousands of personalized TV remote caddies every year. Trust me; there are no stupid ideas. Actually, you satisfied my number one rule for pitching a concept – that you be part of the market for it. The first best way to test the viability of a product is to know that you would buy it yourself.”
She nodded and seemed to regain a little of her composure. Clearly, Ally had been nervous about pitching me one-on-one and I unintentionally made her more nervous by teasing her.
“If this is your number one rule, shouldn’t everyone on your team know it?” she said with a smile. Obviously, she gathered her feet under her quickly.
I smiled back. “Now everyone does.”
“Thanks. I’ll play with this a little and let you get back to your contracts.” She glanced over at my desk. “Is that the baby?” she said, pointing to a picture frame.
I handed the photograph to her. “The picture’s a couple of weeks old, so of course he looks completely different now.”
“He’s really cute.”
“Thanks.”
“Reese?”
“Yeah, Reese. It’s Greek for, ‘He who doesn’t sleep very much.’”
She grinned and handed the picture back to me. At the same time, she nodded toward another frame. “Is that him with your wife?”
I took the photograph of the two of them cuddling that Saturday before our last date together. I touched the frame, but I didn’t pick it up. “Yeah, it is.”
“This has to be tough for you.”
I was tiring of hearing people say that, but it wasn’t fair to her to let it show. “I’m getting better at dealing with it.”
“You know, you’re not giving off any signs of freaking out at all. That’s admirable.”
“Freaking out really isn’t one of my available choices. Not with a baby to take care of.”
“I guess you’re right. You’re lucky to have him at a time like this.”
I looked up at her, surprised at the insight of the comment. No one else had said anything like that to me. “You’re right; I am. It’s hard to wallow when he’s around. And it’s hard to think that the world sucks when you get a glimpse at how amazing it seems to him.”
She settled back in her chair. “You’re on an adventure.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, like one of those guys who gets thrown into a heroic situation against his will.”
“A reluctant hero.”
“Something like that.”
She reached over and touched the original picture I handed her. “Too bad he doesn’t sleep.”
“Most of the time it’s too bad. Sometimes it’s just what you need at 2:30 in the morning.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Yeah, I can understand that.”
“It’s just that, a lot of times, I’m up anyway. It’s the weirdest thing how stuff will just creep up on me. Even when I’m sleeping. I’ll be floating along and then suddenly something will remind me that I’m that widower with the tiny baby and the runaway daughter.” I surprised myself by talking to her this way, since I barely knew her. But she seemed more receptive than most people I spoke to and not at all uncomfortable with these subjects. With most people, opening up made me feel like I was either being boring or feeding someone’s prurient curiosity. “It happens to me in meetings sometimes. You can watch for it now that I’ve told you.”
“At which point, I’ll bring up something completely inane like personalized cookie jars and snap you right back into the moment.”
I laughed. “That’s very generous of you.”
“The cookie jar thing really was stupid, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t stupid. Work it up.”
“You think so?”
“Look, it might be stupid, but it’s worth exploring a little further. What’s the downside?” I smiled after employing my catchphrase of the moment.
“I will.” She stood up to leave. “Thanks for the time. They told me you were approachable, but I was still a little concerned about just barging in here with an idea.”
“Come in any time. Really.”
“Thanks for the invitation.”
Ally smiled and left the office.
I ran my hand over the picture I showed her. Reese did look very different now. Are you changing right this second while I’m not with you? I needed to bring some new
prints into the office. Maybe even one of those picture frames that cycled digital images so I could constantly have the latest shots of my son sitting on my desk with me. I was relatively certain that Lisa would object to a nanny-cam.
Crossing the Bridge
Crossing the Bridge is a novel about longing – longing for a life that you lost, longing for a woman you can’t love, longing for meaning when everything seems meaningless. These opening pages of the novel show why the novel’s protagonist, Hugh Penders, is so lost in longing.
They closed the Pine River Bridge for six hours after my brother drove off it. I heard that the rush hour commute was a nightmare that day. I remember thinking that Chase, who loved to make fun of the “drones” heading to Hartford every morning in their Brooks Brothers suits, would have found it satisfying to see so many of them backed up on River Road, chafing at the maintenance crews who couldn’t possibly appreciate how valuable their time was. Chase could find entertainment in practically anything. He would have found even this amusing.
By the time the police reopened the bridge for traffic, my mother was on her third Valium and my father hadn’t moved from the window in hours. I wasn’t sure what he thought he would find by looking out there. It wasn’t Chase. Richard Penders knew his son was gone forever.
I sat in the living room with them for hours, sharing their suffering and their astonishment at the way life pivots. But other thoughts filled my mind as well, thoughts of something I couldn’t ever talk about to them. Chase and I had been together only a few hours before he died. His personality changed when he was drunk, and he had a lot to drink by the time I met up with him. The alcohol had made him say things I didn’t want to hear, and when I’d had enough, we’d argued and I’d left him to make his way home on his own.
I should have known not to let him drive. Before I got in my car and took off, wondering what the hell was wrong with him, I should have reminded myself that my annoyance with him was temporary. Then I should have taken him with me to sleep off his foul mood. That I didn’t, that I tossed it off with the easy confidence that I had the luxury of being pissed at him and that I would always be there when Chase really needed me, was something I knew I was going to have to live with. But I knew I couldn’t share it with my parents. If I ever admitted in any way that I had anything to do – even tangentially – with their son’s death, I don’t know where that would have left me in the family.
I couldn’t move myself to try to console Chase’s girlfriend Iris until the wake. They’d been together for nearly a year and I knew she needed consolation at least as much as the rest of us. But as soon as I thought of her, I convinced myself that I wasn’t the person she needed to get this from, that in fact she might prefer no comfort at all to any she would receive from me.
Though at eighteen Chase was three years my junior, he’d gone on his first date before me and always had more women around him. Iris was the first one – after many had flitted in his space before her – who didn’t seem like a groupie. She was centered and soft-spoken. And it was only when he was around Iris that Chase showed any desire to let someone take care of him. She was the only person I’d ever seen him willingly defer to, though even then it didn’t happen often.
I found it fascinating to watch the two of them in action. At least until the day that I realized that what really fascinated me was watching Iris in action. Long after it began, I became cognizant of how completely she had taken residence in my thoughts. I thought about talking to her, sharing quick snippets of conversation, a meaningful glance over my brother’s escapades. I thought about what the two of them were like alone together, laughing, kissing, making love. This was very new territory for me. It wasn’t simply that I hadn’t thought this way about any of my brother’s previous girlfriends. I hadn’t thought this way about any woman at all. It was simultaneously disorienting and seductive. I considered it all harmless fantasizing on my part.
Until the day that it went beyond that.
On the first warm day of the early spring, when Chase left me to await Iris’ arrival while he attended to other business – something he was doing with greater frequency – Iris and I kissed. Before it happened and even more so afterward, I was conflicted and unsteady. But while we were kissing, maybe thirty seconds that redefined the act for me, I knew that this was precisely what I should be doing, what I needed to be doing. And in the moment, Iris’ reactions seemed to echo mine. At first, she seemed confused to be moving toward me, and afterward she looked at me with embarrassment and regret. But while it was happening, I remain certain that Iris was fully and willingly there with me.
From then until the day Chase died, I tried my best to avoid being with them. I came home from college less often on the weekends and made certain never to be alone in a room with Iris. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could control myself. I just couldn’t bear to see the warning in her eyes.
When I arrived with my parents at the wake, Iris was sitting alone in Chase’s viewing room in the funeral parlor. Chase had been dead fifteen hours at that point and I’d spent most of that time standing guard over my mother, watching her watching the distance. While I did, I replayed my last conversation with my brother, thinking about how leaving this home – something I’d planned to do once college was over anyway – would have an entirely different meaning to me now. Chase would forevermore occupy every chair and glance out from every picture frame. These were the thoughts I’d been tape-looping since the police officer had come to the door to tell us about the accident. But still, when I saw Iris sitting by herself, the very first thing that came to my mind was, do I touch her?
I approached her tentatively, hoping that someone would get there before me or that she would make some movement that would give me an indication of what to do. Instead, her eyes stayed focused on the casket at the front of the room. When I was only a few feet away from her, she turned in my direction. She stood and we embraced awkwardly, our stomachs and heads touching briefly and then pulling away. Then she sat down quickly. My parents were settling into seats in the row reserved for immediate family and I knew that I should join them, but I felt compelled to sit with Iris, at least for a short while.
The first time I met Iris, I thought she was beautiful. All of my brother’s girlfriends were beautiful, so this didn’t surprise me in any way. What did surprise me was that she seemed more beautiful to me as I got to know her and as I got to see her from a wide variety of perspectives. She was more stunning with disheveled hair after wrestling with Chase, with a flushed face after a snowball fight, with clothes spattered electric blue after helping my brother paint his room. And she seemed nearly unearthly now, with her eyes thickly encircled in red, her cheeks ruddy. Looking at her this way, I somehow felt that her loss had been greater than mine.
“Anything I say would be inadequate,” I said to her. She glanced over at me, pressed her lips together in a semblance of a smile, and reached out to give my hand a momentary squeeze.
“I’m so sorry for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry for Chase.” She turned from me and leaned forward to touch my mother’s shoulder, and my mother held her head against Iris’ for the longest time, both of them sobbing. When Iris sat back again, she didn’t attempt to dab at her eyes. And she didn’t try to look in my direction.
I wanted something other than that kiss to be between us at that point. I wished she and Chase had been together for years so my role for her could have been more brotherly. I wished that the age difference between us had been greater so I could have simply put her head on my shoulder and cried with her. I wished I could have said to her, “Give this time. We’ll work through it together.” But all I could do was sit there confused, wondering how to fit this new collection of wishes into the set of things I was already hoping had turned out differently.
“I need to go with them,” I said after a while. She nodded without turning.
When the funeral was over, I didn’t see Iris again.
> As she left the gravesite, she brushed her lips on my cheek and said good-bye. Her parents had come with her and, as he walked past me, her father clapped his hand on my arm and gestured upward with his chin. My eyes moved from his to Iris’ back, only leaving there when another friend of Chase’s approached me.
For the rest of that summer, I attempted to set myself in motion. Motion of any type might have sufficed, but I found myself rooted to my room, my Discman burning dozens of batteries. I started skipping dinners when I realized that I could find no sustenance in my mother’s open-throated sorrow or my father’s empty resolve. I’ve heard that grief sometimes pulls families together. But I had no experience with that. I never felt more untethered in my life than I did in those months after the accident. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t know how to act or when any sense of pleasure or laughter or peace would return. It was that I also didn’t know where I would be or who I would be with when they did.
The summer was ending and my senior year at Emerson College was ready to begin. But as I packed during the third week of August, I knew it wasn’t for Boston. When I got in the car, I still didn’t know where I would end up driving. But as I crossed the Pine River Bridge, I had one definite destination in mind.
Anywhere but here.
The Journey Home
The Journey Home is about three people trying to find or redefine home. In this scene, Warren, who has suddenly found himself without a job or a marriage contends with the realities this his mother, Antoinette is slowly losing her battle with Alzheimer’s.
Mom turned and headed toward the couch as deliberately as her varicose-veined legs would carry her.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, sitting heavily and twirling her engagement ring around on her finger.
Warren closed the apartment door and then sat across from her. “You don’t look fine, Mom. Did someone do something to get you angry? Did I do something to get you angry?”
Recovery Page 5
