Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

  “Yes,” Celia says.

  A woman at the door waiting to sit down with her family glares at us, as if our delay in paying were a purposeful goad to her. I look the other way, at a couple in their late fifties who are eating one table over with a young man in a blue blazer and a young pregnant woman who is either their daughter or daughter-in-law. By the horsey features she shares with the older woman, I’m guessing she’s the daughter. I noticed the husband earlier, when we came in, consulting with the waitress over the wine list. John was no expert, but he always chose the wine, and took great care in doing it, which I appreciated, making me old-fashioned, I’m sure.

  Alec takes the bill straight to the cashier’s podium and disposes of it there. We gather our coats up and follow him into the parking lot.

  The snowflakes are small and dry, floating like dandelion seeds over the tops of the cars. They haven’t begun to stick and are barely visible on the drive home, even looking for them as I do from the backseat, gazing over the darkened public school athletic fields, where only Celia did much playing, and into the yards of the houses, and across the lawn in front of the town hall, sights I take in now as I never do when driving by myself.

  It’s inevitable, I suppose, that when they’re here I feel guilt for having dragged them back, knowing that they’d rather be getting on with their lives apart from me and this place, and yet their presence is such a comfort, the chance to be able at least to shelter and feed them, no matter how powerless I am to help them out in the world. Even their size is comforting, how they take up so much more space than they used to, their bodies warm and full, a good in themselves, not nearly so fleeting as all their worries.

  I’ve vacuumed the house, tidied and dusted in the hopes Michael and Alec won’t be quite so affected by whatever it is in the air that bothers them. None of them seems to notice, but then they’ve just arrived so I suppose there’s no reason they should.

  It’s Michael who resists the place the most, though he lives the closest and is here most often. It’s been true since we first moved here.

  From the kitchen, I hear Alec sneeze, followed by the tap and release of Michael opening a bottle of beer. Celia’s bag knocks against the spindles as she climbs the staircase.

  It’s only when they return and I see these rooms through their eyes that I realize how little of the inside I’ve changed. I did strip off the dried-grass wallpaper in the study and paint over the dining room’s drab green walls with a few coats of solid white, but most everything else I’ve left as it was: a watercolor landscape we were given as a wedding gift still hangs over the couch; the side tables I found decades ago at a stall in Chelsea sit on either side of it, supporting the fluted-glass lamps my parents gave us for our wedding, and which we had in our living room in Samoset. When they’re not around I see right through these objects, back to when the five of us were all together.

  It’s late already, but if I go straight up for my bath, I’ll miss the chance to sit with them a little longer, so I fold the paper to the crossword and take a seat by the empty fireplace, waiting for them to settle.

  Celia

  Mom wheeled on us in the kitchen, crying, “No! No!”

  We were getting cereal. The trussed turkey sat pale and bulbous on the counter behind her.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “An onion! I forgot to get an onion!”

  Michael’s chest and shoulders crumpled forward in relief at the insignificance of the cause for this year’s Christmas-morning panic.

  “We’ll get one,” I said.

  “Where, for heaven’s sake!”

  “The convenience store,” I said. “I’ll go after breakfast.”

  “But the stuffing!” she said. “The stuffing!”

  “It’s just an onion,” Michael pleaded, “it doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters!” she shouted, slapping her thigh.

  “I thought we had some,” Alec said through the white surgical mask that he wore over his mouth and nose to protect himself from the atmosphere of the house. He pointed under the table, where a red mesh bag of sweet onions lay at the bottom of a terra-cotta planter beside the birdseed.

  “Ah!” Mom called out. “Ah! Thank goodness! When did I get these? How silly.” She bent down, grabbed the bag, and reached for a pair of scissors to slash it open.

  “Jesus,” Michael said, “that took a week off my life.”

  “Please, Michael, stop exaggerating,” Mom said.

  I carried my cereal bowl into the dining room. Alec, still in his bathrobe, had dashed ahead of me and already had the A section spread on the table in front of him. He lifted the beveled cone of his mask off his face in order to feed, leaving it resting on his forehead like a stunted horn. Paul’s footsteps padded above the ceiling. He’d gotten in the previous night and was up in my room getting dressed. The jet lag and mis-timed meals would throw off his blood sugar. He needed to eat soon.

  “Is something the matter?” Aunt Penny said, appearing in the doorway. She had on her black wool pants and black turtleneck and black cardigan and gray shawl.

  “No,” Alec said without looking up from the paper. “Everything’s fine.”

  She put on her reading glasses and leaned in to examine the thermostat. “It’s arctic in here,” she said. “I don’t know how your mother survives—I have to turn it up.” She was acclimated to her New York apartment where the radiators ran so hot she had to keep windows open in January. She arrived each year with a suitcase full of woolens, girded for battle over the heat.

  “Aren’t the two of you cold?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Christ on a bike!” Michael exclaimed, entering the dining room with a mug of coffee and a palm full of pills. “Where did that come from?”

  A tabby cat was rubbing its flank against the front radiator.

  “Mom,” Alec said, lowering his mask over his mouth and nose, “there’s a cat in here.”

  “It’s Nelly!” Mom said from the kitchen. “I let her in this morning. She’s Dorothy’s cat from next door, she’s perfectly sweet.”

  Aunt Penny leaned down and began petting the creature. “She just wants to get warm like the rest of us, don’t you, kitty?”

  “You’re eating?” Mom exclaimed, looking in on us in alarm. “What about the stockings?”

  “Mom,” Michael said, “I’m trying to be an adult.”

  “Oh, come on,” Mom said, in a sweet voice now. “I was up till midnight with them.”

  There had been no interruption in the doing of stockings. We had done them every year of our lives. When the old felt tore, Mom sewed it back up again.

  “Yes, we should do the stockings,” Aunt Penny agreed.

  And so the three of us sat in a row on the couch in the living room and were handed our stuffed red stockings. In each of them were pencils, miniature bars of soap, Kit Kats, lip balm, mints, etc. Deodorant for Michael, a pair of earrings for me, dark chocolate for Alec, and always a clementine in the toe. Mom went into the closet in the other room and got us shoe boxes to put our little presents in. We thanked her for each item as we opened it. She looked on, smiling, saying they were nothing much, just things we might use, or that she knew we liked.

  “Oh, there you are,” Aunt Penny said when Paul entered the living room, sleepy-eyed in his button-down, V-neck sweater, and corduroys, grinning at the sight of the three of us lined up like toddlers.

  We had been set to fly together. But the night before, he had changed his mind. He wanted the two days to write, he said. An unimpeachable excuse, given that I was asking him to sacrifice far more time than that so I could leave my job. Impossible to argue with. But also a dare. Because was I really supposed to believe that his suddenly holding back on coming to be with my family had nothing at all to do with my telling him ten days ago that I was pregnant? Nothing to do with the fact that he’d barely said a word about it since? But it was late, and I was packing—I didn
’t want to take the dare and open everything up hours before I left.

  At least now he was here more willingly. I could tell that much from his relaxed expression, the kind he had after a productive day at the desk, his baseline tension alleviated for an evening. He’d had his two days to himself. He had made his point, if that’s what it was. Now he was happy enough to go along with the festivities, to accept my aunt’s approval of him as a handsome, marriageable prospect, to laugh with Michael and Alec, and laugh at them, settling himself at a mildly ironic distance from the goings-on. I’d wanted him to step between the others and give me a kiss good morning, but he took a seat by the window, watching us from there.

  “Oh, it’s The Messiah,” Mom said, and bolted out of her chair to turn up the radio. “King’s College,” she added, “they’re broadcasting it live.” She told us this every year with the same note of excitement. Behind her, in the window, hung the Venetian Advent calendar that used to belong to one of us when we were little, and which she still opened a window of each morning until we arrived, when she said that one of us should do it, for the fun of it.

  After stockings, we ate the ritual coffee cake and bacon. Then it was back to the living room for the presents from under the tree. Mom dashed to and fro as we opened gifts, basting the bird, pulling out the good plates, getting the silver from the cupboard. Aunt Penny supplied us with our annual sweaters, hats, gloves, and scarves. Alec complained that he was wheezing despite his mask. It wasn’t the cat, he said, it was the mold in the basement. Its spores were everywhere.

  Michael’s presents to each of us were compilation CDs he’d burned, Mahler for Aunt Penny, Ella Fitzgerald for my mother, what we ought to be listening to for Alec and me, and a concessionary alt-rock mix for Paul. He did his best to pay attention as we each opened them, but kept circling back into the front hall, to the telephone, willing it to ring, willing Bethany to call. She had eventually offered some excuse for her failure to appear after that night he’d been on the verge of leaving his apartment to seek her out, and they had been seeing each other since, though with enough ambiguity on her part as to their status to leave Michael perpetually on edge. Now she’d gone back to Cleveland and hadn’t contacted him in four days, having forbidden him to call her there, given the wrath it might incur from her parents. And once again, he was tortured by her silence.

  Soon everyone but Paul and Michael had joined the struggle in the kitchen. Each time my mother opened the oven, Aunt Penny hovered at her side, asking if the juices were running clear, because if they weren’t it could be quite dangerous. When the time came, Alec mashed the potatoes, and I sautéed the beans with almonds, and prepped my annual pecan pie. In the final stages, Mom cursed what a furnace the house had become, and threw the back door wide open as Aunt Penny looked on, aghast.

  By dusk it was over and Michael had set to work on the dishes. I told Paul I wanted to go for a walk and he consented. The cold air woke me almost immediately from the stupor of the house. I sensed the numbness lifting. I wanted him to put his arm around me, but he walked a few feet away. The ice on the street and the snow in the yards were blue in the fading light. There were no cars out. No sound that wasn’t absorbed by the snow. I reached over and took his gloved hand in mine.

  “So what do you think?” I said. “Do you think maybe we should talk?”

  “Now?” he asked.

  As if my pregnancy had been suspended for the holiday.

  “It is that unpleasant? Just to talk about it?”

  “No,” he said, as though fending off the suggestion that he was being evasive.

  Neither of us had anticipated this and we certainly hadn’t planned it. My diaphragm had always worked before. I was still adjusting to the fact myself. While I hadn’t pictured him being over the moon with excitement, I’d imagined it might be the cause for at least a bit of wonder at the prospect. At least a little speculation. Instead, it seemed he’d decided to bide his time until I announced I was having an abortion. Which wasn’t illogical. I didn’t want to stay home with a baby. He couldn’t afford to support us even if I did. There wasn’t room for a child right now, not with what we were each pursuing.

  “I don’t know,” he said, slipping his hand from mine. “I guess—I mean—you haven’t said much about it. I don’t even really know what you’re thinking. Maybe I don’t want to sway you.”

  “Well, saying nothing makes it seem pretty obvious what you want, doesn’t it?”

  His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his peacoat, his shoulders hunched forward. In these passive moments of his, he seemed more like a third brother to me than a boyfriend. Someone to be tended. Even now, in the face of this thing affecting me so much more than him, somehow he was the subject of it all.

  We kept going, through what was now nearly darkness, past the black-and-white Colonials, the little Capes hunkered in the snow, the stucco semi-mansion with its drawn shades. I almost never saw lights on here, or people out in their driveways. The neighborhood seemed an abandoned place even when populated. I would never live here again, nor anywhere like it.

  I started crying. It had been like this for a couple of weeks now. Tears welling up out of nowhere and running down my cheeks, as if I were a glass filled to the brim, spilling at the slightest motion. I resented the condition: my aching breasts, the stench of food, the back pain and cramping. Paul was fretting over lost freedom in some imagined future, while my body was stealing my mind.

  The waterworks brought him to my side again. He put his arm around me, and I leaned in against his chest, furious at needing him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have brought it up. It just seemed like you were ignoring it, too.”

  “I can’t ignore it.”

  “I know, I’m just saying, it’s not like I can really believe it’s my choice, even if I did want a kid, and maybe I do, I don’t know. But what difference would that make? I’m not the one in charge.”

  “What does that mean?” I said, standing upright again, away from him.

  “What choice do I have? In this, or working more again, or anything that affects our whole lives? If I love you, I have to agree with you. That’s the way it’s always been. I can see it in Alec. He’s the same way. He thinks he isn’t in control, but he’s controlling everything.”

  “That’s a cop-out. It’s bullshit. You think I’m asking you to have a kid? I’m sorry I got pregnant, but I didn’t do it alone.”

  “I really don’t want to fight,” he said.

  “After telling me I’m controlling your whole life.” We’d stopped in the middle of the empty street, facing each other. “Were you being controlled having every morning to yourself while I went to work? Really?”

  “No,” he said, “I’m grateful. I’ve told you that.”

  He had that set look to his face, as if battening down the hatches for some storm of irrationality. In the last three years, being with Paul had allowed me the beginnings of sympathy for my mother. I’d always defended my father in front of her, my father who never wanted to fight. I’d defended him because he seemed weak. But was I supposed to do that again? To defend Paul from myself? All couples have arguments. That’s how Mom used to explain away her shouting. The difference being that there was no child of mine to hear this. And perhaps there never would be.

  “I don’t want to argue either,” I said. “But I was sick again this morning. You’re not the only one not sleeping much right now. I haven’t told anyone about this except you. So we need to talk. And not next week, or next month.”

  “I get it,” he insisted, eager, now that I had cornered him, to agree and move on.

  Over his shoulder stood the mock-Tudor house my old friend Jill Brantley used to live in with her divorced mother, where she and I used to get high in the attic, like an after-school special about wayward girls and the telltale signs of delinquency. This street—this whole town—was so familiar that I looked straight through it, as if it were no longer a place unto
itself but merely an opening onto the past. And holding off the tidal pull of that earlier time, preventing my getting drawn back into the house we had just left, into the family and all its repetitions, was Paul—a separate person, who had never existed here. Unimplicated. Living in the present. Aggravating and noncompliant, but attentive and affectionate, too. Who seemed to keep wanting to be with me.

  “We’ll discuss it all tomorrow,” he said. “I promise. Can we be okay for now?” he said, his eyes gently pleading.

  He stepped forward and hugged me, without my asking.

  What choice did I have but to believe him?

  As we were taking off our boots and jackets in the front hall, Alec swept by flashing widened eyes above his mask in a silent warning of drama. It turned out that Michael, in our absence, had broken down and called Bethany’s parents’ house. Her father had answered. Michael had asked to speak to Bethany. She had come to the phone and told him he was making everything worse. And then she’d told him that it was over. That they could never speak again.

  “Maybe you could go up,” Mom said to me. “He’s in his room.”

  “You couldn’t stop him?”

  “There’s no need to shout,” she said. “We were just here reading. He used the other phone.”

  We’d been in the house together, all of us, for nearly three days. I’d left for twenty minutes. Quickly absenting himself from the situation, Paul collected his novel from the coffee table and retreated to the wingback chair at the far end of the living room.

  “She never did sound terribly suitable,” Aunt Penny said, standing over the fire with the iron poker.

  I found Alec in the kitchen, vacuuming up a tin of chocolate chip cookies, as though we hadn’t already had two desserts.

  “What?” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  “So he just went up without telling anyone, and called her?”

  “Basically. He was practically keening afterwards and Mom lost it, started yelling at him. Saying he was being melodramatic. She can’t handle it when he gets like that. You may have noticed this,” he said, “over the years.”