The One Who Got Away: A Novel

by Bethany Bloom

  Her heart pounded as she hovered the mouse over the “about us” link, which she discovered in small font at the bottom of the page. She clicked it so fast she surprised herself. And there he was, standing next to one of his doors, stained the color of espresso. He wore a white t-shirt and a baseball cap. The same grin. The same stance. She remembered the feeling of his bicep as she held the crook of his arm. The rough feeling of his hands. The way she felt when they had explored a new town together…like she was being carried away by something, steered from a spot in the pit of her stomach and led forward, fast, in a direction she couldn’t discern. Her breath caught at the memory of it.

  All at once, she clicked the red “x” in the corner of the screen. She simply could not allow herself to look at that. Things were different now. At that moment, in fact, her fiancé was curled on the loveseat, sleeping, an arm’s distance from her.

  Olivine sat watching him for a moment, and when he didn’t stir, she slipped in behind him. She spooned against his buttocks, which were muscular and hard, even in repose. She nuzzled her cheek into the back of his neck, feeling the tiny hairs at the nape.

  “What?” he murmured.

  “I’m sorry, are you tired?” she asked, softly.

  “Yeah.” He opened one eye, then closed it again and nestled deeper into the cushions.

  She waited for a moment, and, when he had drifted back to sleep, she slipped out from behind him and returned to the computer. She typed the website address again, quickly, and when Henry’s photo came up, she imagined herself standing next to him in a workshop, a barn somewhere, nestled in a meadow surging with wildflowers, knee-high lupine and wild roses and columbines in red, blue and yellow. And in her mind, she stood in the entrance to the barn and she watched him, in his clean white t-shirt, as he planed boards and blew away sawdust.

  And now she was climbing the stairs at her sister’s house. Would she tell her sister about the research she had done? Would she tell her parents, at dinner, that she was engaged? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t feel sure of anything just now.

  The noise from her nieces and nephews, giggling and shouting, trailed off as she climbed to the upper section of the house. The washer and dryer were installed in a closet off the upstairs hallway. The bi-fold doors yawned open, and Yarrow was bent over the washing machine. Olivine stood just behind her as Yarrow squinted into the musty darkness.

  Olivine whispered, but her tone was throaty and urgent: “You haven’t said anything to Mom, have you?”

  “What?” Yarrow banged her head on the metal drum as she straightened her body and removed her head. “Oh, you startled me.” Yarrow laughed. “Of course I haven’t said anything.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “I kind of thought you would. Tonight. I guess I thought this would be your engagement party. Or something. Isn’t Paul coming?”

  “No, he’s in surgery. Emergency,” Olivine lied.

  “Oh. Well, I guess it will have to wait then.”

  “Yeah. Another time. Soon.”

  Olivine joined Yarrow in her bid to match the socks in the basket, which was overflowing on top of the dryer. They worked in silence for a few moments, matching a variety of colors, sizes, and shapes and folding the tops, then tossing them back into the basket to be sorted into drawers at another time. It was a silence Olivine relished. The beauty of not having to speak. Of being so close with a person that you felt instantly comfortable. It reminded her, once again, of Henry. Of being in his Volkswagen, of saying nothing as they logged mile after mile and then, every now and then, looking at one another and grinning, like they both knew a secret too important, too juicy, to put into words.

  It was Olivine who spoke first. “When you were fixing to get married, did you feel like throwing up all the time?”

  Yarrow laughed. “Oh, yeah. Definitely. it's like that for everyone, Olivine. It's never what you think it's going to be. Everyone feels like throwing up or backing out when they get engaged.”

  “How could that be true?”

  “Well, it’s true for some of the women I know, at least. But for all of us, I think, there’s this little voice that says you aren’t ready for this. That you’re still a child. That you can’t possibly be trusted with that kind of a decision. That you can’t be expected to know what’s going to make you happy over the next year. The next month. The next six decades. I think you always feel too young and ill-prepared to make a step like this.”

  “Yeah. But when you’re thirty-two?”

  “No matter how old you are. It just means you’re taking it seriously enough.” She twisted another pair of socks together and held them, balled up in her hand. She looked down for a moment and then looked directly at Olivine, her voice hushed. “You know, I don't know if this is going to be any consolation to you, but now that I've been married…what?... going on ten years, sometimes I’m not sure whether it matters whom you end up with. Even if you marry the greatest guy in the world, you’re going to have to make some concessions. You’re going to have to work pretty hard.”

  “Not to romanticize it, though, huh?”

  Yarrow chuckled and fished through the laundry basket for another match. “No, really. When I was younger, I believed in one true love. Now, I wonder if it would have been any different had I married Bruce or John or Greg, or…wow. I can’t even remember anyone else I dated. I sometimes think that only the scenery would change. The town. My address. The socks. But the washing machine. Now that would probably be the same. Old and used and kind of smelly if you put your head in there.”

  “What about your kids? They wouldn’t be the same.”

  “You know what? That's precisely it. That's what makes you, at some point, believe that whatever happens—whatever arbitrary decisions you’ve made – those were the ones that were meant to be. That it couldn’t be any other way.” She found another match, rolled the socks, and continued. “I can’t imagine life without my kids. These kids. Not one freckle or hair different, and that means the life decisions I’ve made, though they’ve landed me in debt and dishwater and dirty socks…these were the decisions I was meant to make.” She laughed, spun around, clutched her arms to her chest, and said, “All this….it was my destiny!”

  Their mom’s voice came in from behind them, at the top of the stairs, “For what it’s worth, I think all of your decisions have been glorious, Yarrow. And I think your kids are glorious, too. But, you know, when you made all of those decisions you weren’t necessarily thinking about ten years down the road. You just started to live.”

  How long had Christine been standing there? Olivine’s face flushed and she bowed her head over the laundry basket.

  “You got married so young, Yarrow, that you weren’t accustomed to being on your own. You never knew how to be selfish with your time,” Christine said. “You hadn’t gotten used to being alone. You just got married and that was that. The path of your life was sort of… set. And here you are.” She paused and folded her arms. “New decisions every day.”

  “Yeah. Guess I didn’t know any better,” Yarrow replied. “And now, before I make any kind of decision…whether I want to go to the store, whether I want to go two hundred miles away on vacation, I have to consider five other opinions.”

  “But you, Olivine,” Christine said, “you can make all kinds of decisions. You can luxuriate in the not knowing. You can go one direction, or you can go another. You have only yourself to consult.”

  “I can’t ‘luxuriate’ in any ‘not knowing’ if I want to make a family,” Olivine replied.

  “Is that what you’re thinking about these days?” Christine paused to look at her before picking up a stack of towels and turning to take them downstairs. “You know that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you talk about a family. I mean, without me bringing it up.”

  “It is not.”

  “Oh, trust me, Olivine. It is. These are the things that moms pay attention to.”

  A bang came from downstairs, followed by their father’s ro
aring laugh. Then, doors slamming, giggles, more squeals, and a clatter. Mom took off down the stairs, balancing the stack of towels in one palm.

  “Oy. What now?” Yarrow said, laughing as she twisted her hair into a loose bun and secured it with a pencil that she found on top of the dryer.

  “Come on,” Yarrow said, squeezing Olivine’s hand and then releasing it as she whispered, “Let’s pour the wine for your I-have-a-secret and-I’m-not-telling-anyone party.”

  *****

  Dinner passed the way these dinners did. Artie told a joke, which made one of the kids laugh, which made another one snort, which made milk shoot out of another one’s nose, which made them all laugh some more. And when the food was eaten, the kids cleared their plates and went into the adjoining room, Marcus carrying baby Claire. And there they sat to watch four men on the television who were wearing bright colors and singing about fruit salad in high-pitched voices.

  The adults lingered over the table, all the dishes left just as they were; everyone afraid to clear them lest it signal the time to leave, and no one was ready for that. The conversation turned to young love, to relationships, and, then, to proposals. Olivine narrowed her eyes at Yarrow, who shrugged and looked away.

  Yarrow and Jon told the story of how they met. It was a story they had all heard before, but Yarrow added little details; specifics that made it feel like it had just happened. And then Yarrow turned to Christine. “So tell us again how Dad proposed.”

  Christine said, “You all know this story.”

  “I know but it’s so good,” Yarrow said, “I love it so much. I mean, here is this model of delicious, perfect love. And it had started quite accidentally.”

  “Delicious? Perfect?” Artie interjected. “You all obviously haven’t seen us trying to find a parking spot at the airport, or when she’s telling me how to fix an appliance, or when I’m driving through a snowstorm….” Artie turned his sideways grin to Christine. “But continue. Tell the story again, if you must.”

  She smiled, patted him on the forearm, and nodded. “I long suspected, and still do, that he didn’t even mean to say it. To propose marriage. That it slipped out in a weak moment. And he loves me too much to confirm this one way or another. We never speak of it.”

  Her father was using the back end of his fork to poke at a piece of gristle on his plate, but he was smiling, and so Christine continued.

  “He had made snowshoes. Because he hurt himself jumping off a balcony. There was a decade or so when he thought he was Superman and infinitely indestructible.”

  “Only a decade?” Jon asked.

  Christine ignored the interruption and continued, “Well, he had just broken his foot because he jumped from a balcony or some such thing, and so he had this great big cast on, and he couldn’t go to work because he couldn’t climb ladders and he couldn’t walk on the tops of two-by-four walls and so he handcrafted these snowshoes because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. He had all this time, and God knows he can’t sit still. Never could. So, in the workshop at the cabin, he worked all day on these snowshoes. He soaked the rawhide to bend it. He laminated the wood, one thin layer after another, and then he pushed them all together to form the curved wood of the shoe.” As Christine spoke, she fidgeted with the charm on her necklace, buzzing it on the chain from left to right. “The way he had designed them, they buckled right onto your boots. They were a little cheesy.”

  “Cheesy? Hell!” Artie said, but he was smiling.

  “So when they were all finished, I took the pair he made for me, and I strapped them on, and I walked around in my front yard, and something about it made me laugh. I laughed and laughed and just fell all over the place into the deep snow,” Christine said, “I felt like such a pioneer. Remember that, Artie?”

  He nodded, smiling, his eyes downcast.

  “To walk on top of snow, on something of your own devising,” Christine said, “It was kind of a thrill… And so, once Artie decided his foot had gotten pretty close to healing, he cut off his own cast, so we could go try them out.”

  “You cut your cast off yourself? What would Paul say?” Jon asked.

  Artie shook his head and Christine went right on talking, “And so we went to Mount Williams, and in those days, everyone would hike to the top in the spring and then ride the couliers—the little chutes—down, down, down on their butts— and sometimes you would make little avalanches with your rear, but you would ride them.” She clapped her hands together. “It was great fun! Remember that, Artie?”

  He nodded.

  “Now, over the years, I suppose, quite a lot of people died that way,” Christine went on, “and so now they really don’t like you to go down on that side of the mountain anymore at all, but this is what we had done. And we sat, afterwards, in the bus, back at the trailhead, and it was just one of those days, with the brilliant sunshine and the hard exercise where your face tingles when you finally stop moving, and we felt so alive and awake and unstoppable. And so there we were, afterwards, in his VW bus. Much like the van that friend of yours used to have, Olivine. Remember that VW?”

  Olivine’s face flushed hot. Henry’s VW van with the wooden floors. And she remembered with a startle, as though it had just occurred, how Henry had pulled over on the side of the road one day, barely off the interstate, and he had swung his legs over to the middle, between their seats and he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to the back of the bus, and he had made love to her, with a passion—an urgency—but also a tenderness unlike any she had experienced before. It had been their second time together, and a truck roared past with his horn blaring, and while Henry was kissing her bellybutton he looked up, and her heart raced at the idea that maybe they were smack in the middle of the road, going at it with wild abandon, as they were. But she was with Henry, and so she knew they were safe. With him, nothing could touch her. She remembered thinking that this was all she would ever need in the world. This Volkswagen van. And this man.

  Everyone at the table was looking at her. “I remember,” Olivine answered, shaking her head a little and casting her eyes down to the tablecloth.

  Christine went on with her story, and Olivine was struck once again by the way she could be in a particular position in her mind, stuck in a thought, right there making love to Henry in a VW van, and yet sitting here with her mother and her father. The memory had been so vivid that the transition away from it took a moment, and she heard her mother’s voice as a buzz in the background, telling the tale they had all heard countless times.

  “And we took off our snowshoes and we grinned at one another and then Artie burst out that we should ‘get married or something.’ I’ll never forget how the Vee-Dub smelled of dogs and gasoline and old wet blankets, and I thought there must be a more romantic way for this to happen, but here it was. This was it.” Christine took the smallest sip of wine. “This was just the kind of guy he was. And I think it slipped out, his proposal, because we had just had a remarkable day. He wasn’t joking. We just felt so right, and I remember thinking: who really cares if he meant to say it. He said it, and I said ‘yes.’”

  Christine paused then, and no one said anything. She stared down into her wine glass as she gave it a swirl, watching the wine lap the sides. She went on: “And then, fast forward all these years...There are years where you feel so trapped with your little kids,” she said, looking up at Yarrow. “Trapped by your own love mostly. You aren’t sure you love to be there every day, but you love them so much that you are stuck. You can’t leave and you feel so ready to move on with this life, but at the same time you want to slow time. To stop time altogether.” Her voice faded to a hush. “But time goes on, and then you are in a new place, and it’s all perfect, because…well, because this is the way it is.” Her lips were rosy and full and, Olivine thought, beautiful.

  “It has worked out just fine for us,” Artie said, after a moment had passed. “I mean, I tell people, we’ve been married ten good years, and people say, that’s al
l you’ve been married? At your age? And I say, ‘Well, now I’ve been married forty years, and about ten of them have been good.’”

  Artie beamed at himself and his joke.

  “You could do worse, you know,” Christine said to him, “And so could Yarrow. And so could Olivine.” Everyone turned to look at the two sisters, sitting side by side. Yarrow turned and winked at Jon. Then she turned to Olivine, who fidgeted with her napkin as she said, “Oh, I know, Mom. Paul is a great guy. Truly he is.”

  “He’s working tonight?”

  “Yes,” she lied again. She hadn’t told him he was invited. He was, at this moment, most likely watching a golf tournament he had recorded or maybe he was taking a bath, relishing the time alone as he did.

  “A lesser woman couldn’t take it, you know. Being with a surgeon. So independent. So busy. And with his humanitarian goals, this whole ‘Doctors Without Borders’ thing. He probably won’t be around for you much.”

  “I think that’s what I love most about him,” she said as she pressed her fork into the leftover potatoes on her plate. She could feel everyone’s eyes on her. She looked up to her mother. “Is that wrong?”

  “Well…” Her mother stood and began stacking dishes, holding forks in one hand, piling plates in another. “Maybe,” she said.

  *****

  In the kitchen, Olivine stood at the sink and squirted a stream of orange liquid soap into the water. Christine moved from the counter to the trash, scraping the dishes. The congealed spots of gravy. The potatoes. Things half eaten and left there. Yarrow pushed through the swinging door.

  This had always been one of Olivine’s favorite parts of the meal, when everything was finished and it was just she and her mother and her sister, moving through the kitchen, as though choreographed. Yarrow owned a dishwasher, but Olivine loved to wash dishes by hand. She loved scrubbing the white plates, bringing them up, still sudsy, to catch the light. To ensure they were clean. And then setting them aside to be rinsed and dried.