When You Went Away

by Michael Baron

  “Works great,” she said, standing up to leave. Reese and I walked her to the door and then, since it was warm enough out, to her car.When we got there, Lisa touched Reese on the cheek. He moved to put her finger in his mouth and she laughed, pulling her hand back. Then she extended her hand to shake mine.

  “Thanks for the job,” she said.

  “Thanks for taking it.”

  She nodded, looked down at the ground, and then back up at me. “I know this is a big deal. I’ll take good care of him.”

  I buried my face in Reese’s scant wisps of hair for a moment and then made eye contact with her. “Yeah, I’m sure you will.” She smiled and got in her car and we watched her drive away. Once she did, I got Reese’s jacket and took him for a walk in his stroller to take advantage of the nice weather.

  If we moved to Halifax, we could probably get by for a few years on our savings. But Halifax wasn’t an option. Maybe Lisa was the next best alternative.

  I felt like a countdown had begun.

  • • •

  One day in April last year, I pulled into the garage and saw Maureen taking packages out of her car on the other side. She smiled at me shyly. Maureen didn’t do that. When you’ve been with someone for half as many years as you’ve been alive, there’s little reason to be shy about anything.

  She came over to my car as I got out. “Hey,” I said, kissing her and taking some of the packages from her arms. She’d been to the mall, which was odd because it was a workday. “What are these?”

  “Nothing, just some stuff we’ve needed.” She looked at me meaningfully. “I was in the neighborhood.” The mall was nowhere near her office. “Why’s that?”

  She smiled. “You might want to sit down. Or at least lean against the car.”

  This got me concerned. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, I think it is. But you might not.” She looked away for a second and then back at me. “I was at the doctor’s.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m pregnant.”

  The statement wouldn’t have seemed more out of context to me if Maureen had said, “I’m from another galaxy.” This was definitely not something we’d planned or even mused over. It was so disorienting that I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  Tanya had been a surprise, too. A real stunner, actually. We’d only been married a few months, right out of college, still reveling in playing house. Maybe, I thought as the notion began to settle in, our lives were made for sudden additions.

  But this was still mind-boggling. It wasn’t as if we’d made plans to turn Tanya’s room into a dance hall when she went to college or anything like that, but we were aware that her departure was imminent and that we had a lot of life left to live. Starting over with another baby wasn’t one of the options I considered. This didn’t mean that I wasn’t willing to consider it; only that my aspirations leaned more toward learning another language or discovering the country inns of New England.

  I looked at Maureen’s face. Obviously, she had much more time to contemplate this news than I’d had and there was no doubt that it thrilled her. In spite of how confounding life with a teenaged Tanya had become, Maureen embraced motherhood. I could feel myself warming to the prospects, to revisiting those nights when Maureen nursed our infant daughter while nestled against my shoulder.

  I settled back against the car and pulled her into my arms. “That’s great,” I said.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Yeah, I think I do.” I squeezed her and let my imagination run. “I really think I do.”

  She kissed me tenderly, the kind of kiss reserved for landmark moments. “I guess we won’t be running off to London on a moment’s notice now, huh? But we’re kinda good at this.”

  “Yeah, we are.” It didn’t seem the appropriate time to mention that she was great at it and that I was, at best, occasionally effective.

  Maureen pulled back, rolled her eyes, and then laughed loudly. “My God, Gerry, a baby.”

  • • •

  When Reese and I got back from our walk, I called the office to tell them I would return on Monday.My assistant started to ask me questions, but I put him off. I would answer all of them when I got back. The rest of this time was for Reese and me.

  After dinner, we went into the family room. This had quickly become his favorite place in the house. We would do all of his favorite things over the next few days and hopefully introduce him to several new ones. I put him down on his playmat and he lifted his head, gurgling and doing those little push-ups infants do. He found himself in the mirror on his activity center and smiled.

  “You can get away with that now, kid,” I said. “When you’re a little older, though, you might not want to be so obviously impressed with your own image.” The advice fell on deaf ears and he continued to admire his reflection. Who could blame him?

  I lay him on his back and held a star-shaped plush toy over his head. His eyes tracked back and forth as I moved it around and he lifted his tiny hand toward it. I brushed the soft fabric against his face and he smiled again. He smiled so easily. I bounced the toy in the air above him and he was transfixed for minutes.

  “We’ll go to the planetarium when you’re a few years older. If you like this thing, wait ’til you see an entire room of them while Pink Floyd is playing.”

  I decided to put on some music. We usually had music on in the house, whether it was Maureen’s jazz or the rock that Tanya and I preferred. But the stereo remained in standby position for the past six weeks. I put my iPod in the dock and searched. Pink Floyd probably wasn’t the best choice. Happily, there was no “children’s music” on the player. The notion that kids needed to have songs about little lambs or monkeys jumping on beds in order to appreciate music always seemed silly to me.With all of the great songs in the world, why should we serve up mediocre ones to our youngest?

  I picked out a Dar Williams album. It was gentle, playful, and melodic; it certainly wouldn’t frighten Reese in any way. But it was real music. As the first song started, I picked up a soft plastic caterpillar to show Reese and we played with this for a while.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go exploring.”

  We walked around the first floor of the house and I introduced him to a number of things that shared his world: the stand mixer in the kitchen, the books in the library, the Tiffany lamp in the living room, the television remote in the family room. And of course the photographs of his mother and sister that were everywhere. I told him what each of these things was and held his hand out to touch every one. He regarded all of these patiently and with varying degrees of interest. I knew this was way over his head, but I wanted him to get accustomed to being aware of his surroundings. I had so much to teach him.

  After that, I gave him a bath. There were splash nights and there were lump nights; this was the latter. He simply lay on his bath pillow, holding onto the sides. He didn’t seem nervous or uncomfortable in any way, just disinterested. I trickled some water over his chest in search of a reaction and didn’t get one, so I decided to wash him quickly and move on.

  I dried him off and brought him to his changing table for a new diaper and pajamas. I got the diaper on and then looked down at him. He had an expression on his face that I interpreted as wistful, though it could have been any number of things, including indigestion. He really was a beautiful child, something I hadn’t noticed often enough in the sweep of these first few months. I promised myself that I would always take the time to watch him, to see him. I was sure that between worry over Tanya and then everything I felt over Maureen I missed all too much already. Now on top of this I would lose a huge portion of every day with him to work. I had to pay as much attention as humanly possible when we were together.

  Impulsively, I bowed down to him and blew a raspberry on his stomach. He laughed – a big, full-throated chuckle. It was the first time I heard him laugh and this made me laugh in response. I did it again and he reacted the same way. He had such a boisterous giggle
for such a little person. I picked him up and held his face next to mine, rubbing our noses together before I finished dressing him.

  “You just earned an extra hour of playtime tonight.”

  We went back to the family room. I put on a Jayhawks album, one of my favorites, and sang the songs to him. I let him stay up until his yawning made it obvious that he needed a break. I knew this was excessive on my part, but we had plenty of time to settle into a more defined routine. For four more days, I would indulge him. And myself.

  In his room, he fell asleep in my arms. I laid him in his crib and then sat in the rocking chair there, watching his body subtly rise and fall. I’m not sure exactly when I fell asleep, but when he woke me in the middle of the night to be fed, I felt surprisingly refreshed. It was the best I had slept in a while.

  TWO

  Trinkets and Trifles

  On Monday, Reese woke up right after I finished my shower, as though he’d set his internal alarm clock to make sure he didn’t miss seeing me off. I felt a strange sense of ceremony to this morning as I gave him a bottle and ate a bowl of cereal. Today, we were beginning the real rest of our lives.

  The previous seven weeks had been artificial in so many ways – from the number of people who drifted in and out of the house to the fact that we had spent virtually every minute together. Now I would leave him for a huge stretch of time, as I would five days a week for somewhere around the next eighteen years. I felt as though I should do something to mark the occasion – that I should say something, write something down, or even put a meaningful song on the stereo while we had breakfast. I wound up not doing any of these things, but I refused to see this as an ordinary day.

  For some reason, it finally registered this morning that if something happened to me Reese would be an orphan. This wasn’t the first time I left him to go to work. But it was the first time I would do so as his only parent. Certainly, there was as much of a chance of my getting stricken down while I was in the house or out shopping with him as there was while I did my job, but it felt like I had a better chance of survival in the kitchen than I would at my office. This was not a healthy line of thinking to follow, and I forced myself away from it by going over one more time the list I had prepared for Lisa. Emergency numbers.Names of friendly neighbors. Toys he liked and things he enjoyed doing. Absurdly, directions to my office.Had I covered everything? Was I forgetting something obvious and important while including a lot of nonsense?

  When Lisa arrived, she immediately walked over to Reese’s baby chair to pick him up. Reese seemed perfectly satisfied to have her holding him and tweeting at him. At this point, he seemed relatively indifferent to whoever was holding him. I knew the day would come soon when he’d start making distinctions, but that day wasn’t today. While I considered this a huge moment in our family life, he was unaware of it and entirely unconcerned. I would keep a mental record of this for him, though.He might want to know about it in the future.

  I walked over to them with the list. “I have all the information you should need here. My office number, my cell phone number, his feeding schedule – though you know how meaningful that is – his nap schedule – though you know how meaningful that is. There’s formula in the refrigerator and he’s started to eat a little rice cereal in the afternoon.”

  “We’re going to have a great time together,” Lisa said, turning to the baby to add in a higher register, “Aren’t we, Reese-y?”

  I reached out and took him from her arms. I kissed him on the cheek and we made momentary eye contact before something else in the room caught his attention. Maybe this was meant to be a dry run. Maybe I was only supposed to go through the motions of getting ready for work and handing him over to the babysitter today before doing it for real tomorrow. I kissed him again and held him against me for a few seconds.

  “What else do you need to know?” I said to Lisa. She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure I can figure everything out.” She reached for the baby and I handed him to her, kissing him on the top of the head as I did so.

  “The phone’s right there. Eat whatever you want. I bought some cold cuts and stuff and there are some leftovers you might like.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m only fifteen minutes away if you need me.”

  “We’re gonna be great,” she said with a thin smile. I nodded, understanding the code for get the hell out of here and let me do my job when I heard it. She was telling me that I was making more of an event out of this than I needed to. She might have been right, but it certainly didn’t feel like it. Reluctantly, I put my sports jacket on, gave Reese one more kiss, and headed out of the house. Even when I got in the car, I thought about going back inside – he would be an orphan if anything happened to me – but I pushed through it and ultimately backed out of the driveway only glancing in the rearview mirror four times on my way out of the neighborhood.

  • • •

  I asked Maureen if we could go out on what became our last Saturday.

  “Go out?”

  “I think it would be good for us.” We hadn’t been out together since that October night when we came home to discover Tanya gone. Reese’s bout with colic was over and he was finally sleeping at least a little. And it really seemed like we needed it.

  “If you want to,” she said. She couldn’t have been more unenthusiastic. Maureen spent a lot of time at home when Tanya left, and she hardly went out at all after the baby was born. We alternated between occasional highs over the newness of our son – when he wasn’t crying – and deeper lows over the whereabouts of our daughter and the endless frustrations of our inability to devise any way to find her. We’d tried the police, private investigators, grilling Tanya’s friends, and a variety of online services I never even knew existed before Tanya disappeared. All proved fruitless and increasingly unnerving.

  I normally would have accepted Maureen’s listlessness, would have joined her in it as an alternative to my desperate sense of helplessness. But I truly believed this wasn’t the right thing to do anymore. We needed a tiny escape from the worry and responsibility.

  “Elise is still home for winter break,” I said. “I’ll give her a call about Saturday night. She loves babies.”

  Maureen lifted her chin slightly and regarded me head on. “Okay,” she said, and I could see that she appreciated that I was taking charge of this.

  We didn’t talk any more about it until Saturday afternoon. Reese was irritable and I walked him through the rooms of the first floor, jiggling him slightly because this seemed to settle him. Maureen walked up to us, playfully mocking my calming efforts by rocking up and down on the balls of her feet. The fact that she was doing anything playful made me happy.

  “So where are you taking me tonight, anyway?” she said. “Fancy restaurant? Seedy hotel?”

  “How about a fancy restaurant and then a seedy hotel?”

  Maureen pretended to give this some thought and then kissed me on the cheek. “How about a neighborhood restaurant and we pray that Reese is asleep when we get back?”

  I smiled. “Can we pretend he’s asleep even if he isn’t?”

  She kissed me again. “Yeah, maybe.”

  A few hours later, we drove down our block and Maureen took my hand. “This was a very good idea,” she said, holding my hand to her face.

  “I’ve missed this.”

  She touched her lips to my knuckles and kept them there for a long moment. “Me too. I guess we didn’t realize how easy everything had become, huh?”

  “I actually think I did realize it. Maybe I just didn’t appreciate it enough.”

  She squeezed my hand. “Let’s take the night off, okay?”

  I looked over at her. “Okay.”We both knew that it was impossible to truly take the night off. Tanya was always on our minds. Reese was an enormous new presence. But even trying to take the night off was a huge deal.

  We had dinner at an Italian place we’d visited easily a hundred times since moving to Port Jefferson. O
ur waitress asked why she hadn’t seen us in so long and we told her about the new baby. The Chianti we ordered was the first alcohol for either of us since October. Maureen wouldn’t normally have had a drink while breastfeeding, but this was all part of taking the night off. When the wine came, I sipped it and then studied the legs of the wine as they slid down the glass. Chianti had been our drink of choice since we went to Tuscany for our fifth anniversary.

  “Castello di Uzzano,” she said, calling to mind the five days we spent in a castle in Greve and the night we made love in an olive grove in the early fall air.

  “We really need to go back there sometime.”

  “Our twentieth isn’t that far away.”

  We touched glasses softly. “No, it’s not.” Tuscany would be the perfect place to celebrate our twentieth anniversary, two years hence. The familiar parts of it would remind us what we dreamed about all those years ago, while the unfamiliar would underscore how those dreams had come alive for us or been replaced by others that bore more meaning. I’d start making the plans. Tanya would be in college then; Reese would be old enough that we could leave him with someone else – Maureen’s parents, perhaps – for a week or ten days or so.

  We lingered over coffee. The owner brought us a slice of ricotta cheesecake to celebrate the birth of our son and we ate it slowly. It had probably been a couple of months since Maureen had a lazy meal. And even though I ate lunch away from the house, away from the demands of an infant, I tended to eat quickly anyway, as though I expected Reese’s call for attention from ten miles away. Maureen and I didn’t say much, holding hands across the table, Maureen running a fingernail lightly across my index finger. Her touch still excited and compelled me, long ago having become an essential part of my physical makeup.

  “If I called Elise and told her that we weren’t coming back until morning, what do you think she would do?” I said while signing the credit card receipt.

  Maureen smiled and let her gaze wander just long enough to let me know she entertained the improbability. “Let’s go home.”