The One Who Got Away: A Novel

by Bethany Bloom

  “Two things?”

  “Yep.”

  “Love and security?” she answered, reflexively, and then she felt awkward, so she laughed.

  He smiled back at her. “A strong cup of tea and a chair. I have two of each. Join me?”

  What was wrong with joining him for a moment? She was committed to Paul. One hundred percent. Besides, she was dying to know how Henry’s dinner had gone with her parents. Maybe it was important, as Christine had said, to close that chapter. To close it once and for all. She wished now that she had worn her engagement ring.

  “Sure.” Olivine smiled. “But I might need to start with a glass of water.”

  He nodded and opened a low-slung canvas camp chair for her on the porch, positioning it so she was looking out on the driveway, at the towering spruce and spindly aspens, their empty branches rocking in the breeze. Then he jogged toward the bus, where he disappeared for a moment. She sank into the chair, thinking she should probably stretch first. She crossed her legs and folded her hands over her belly.

  Henry returned with a plastic tumbler of water—no ice—and two empty mugs. He handed her the water and poured tea from the green Stanley Thermos near his work table.

  “Goodness,” he said, “I remember your legs.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “What?” Her stomach dropped.

  “After all this time, just the sight of your legs. They bring back memories. Isn’t that funny? Hiking in the woods. Their strength and their ability. To just run up mountains. So long, so strong. Holding you up in the world.”

  She wasn’t sure how to respond, so she took a sip of water. It tasted so good that she kept drinking, downing the entire glass in moments. A splash burbled out of her lip and down her shirt. She wiped it away, looking down. Then she raised the empty water glass toward him and set it down on the porch near her chair, and he handed her a mug of tea, the steam scattering in the fading light. She settled back into the canvas of the chair and extended her legs in front of her, crossing them at the ankles.

  She took a sip of the tea, and she closed her eyes and she shook her hair out of the elastic that bound it. She felt it cascade around her face.

  She was aware that he was watching her, from his own chair, set facing her, and when she opened her eyes, she held his gaze even after her mind told her to look away.

  “Do you remember that last night together?” Henry said, his voice soft and deep. “Lying there on the floor of that apartment I was going to rent? And I asked you if you ever thought of yourself as a color? And you said you were orange. I’ve never forgotten that. How you sat up when I asked you the question and you hugged your knees against your chest; how you were able to fold yourself into a tight roll, all this leg and arm. And your blouse, it was white and open at the top and your skin was tan and there was a sprinkling of freckles right across your collarbone, just like the ones across your nose.” He paused, still looking at her. “I can take myself back there. When I want to.”

  “Do you want to?” she asked, without meaning to.

  He was quiet for a moment, staring into his mug of tea.

  “Take yourself back there?” she prodded.

  “All the time. Every day of my life. That’s why I’m here, Olivine.”

  Silence followed. Wind whispered through the empty branches and she felt the leaping once more in the deepest part of her.

  “Then why did you go?” she asked, her voice small.

  He rubbed his fingertips back and forth along his forearm. First in a circular pattern, now in a figure eight. The veins on his arms ran thick like routes on a highway map.

  He looked up at her finally, and she struggled to keep her face blank, fighting the urge to jump in and speak. To answer for him. To let him off the hook. This was her chance, finally, to close that chapter.

  “I went because I had to. I had to go. I did, Olivine. But I always knew that, when the time was right, we would find one another again. And, look. We did.”

  “Sure, we found one another again,” she replied. “But the time is not right.”

  “No?”

  “No,” she scoffed.

  “Why?”

  “Because you are married. And I’m about to be.”

  “But you’re not married yet. And my wife is in love with someone else.”

  She considered his words, and she thought of Paul. Beautiful, kind Paul. “I might as well be married,” she said. “I’m committed to Paul. When I commit to someone, I take it very seriously.”

  “I would expect nothing less from you, Olivine.”

  “Then what is this all about?”

  “I had to come back. I just had to. We were so perfect for each other. Hand in glove. Peas in pod. Stars and moon. All the other cliché things you could say about two people belonging with one another for the rest of eternity.”

  “So I am supposed to wait for you for ten years. With nothing. No call. No nothing. That’s pretty arrogant.”

  “Don’t you believe in the one true love?”

  “Please.”

  “Please, what? You can’t tell me that what we had wasn’t amazing. Something unlike you’ve ever experienced before. And when something like that happens, it has to be right. It has to happen, even if it takes a few years to come about.”

  “It wasn’t a few years, Henry. It was ten. Ten years.”

  “Even if it takes ten years. Even if it takes a lifetime. The truth is, I wasn’t ready for you. For this. Until right now. And I don’t think you were either. If I had come back three or four years ago, even six months ago, things would have fallen apart. And then we’d have had to wait even longer. The fact that we are here, right now, despite all of the reasons for us to not be here, together, sharing a cup of tea. Now that speaks for something.”

  “So much time has passed, Henry.”

  “What is time? What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a lot of difference. A hell of a lot.”

  “You’ve grown. I’ve grown. All that means is that we know what we want now,” Henry said.

  “We do?”

  “Just hear me out, Ollie. I wasn’t ready, before now, for you. For this. But I am now. And I think you are. And now this has been allowed to happen. And so, if you look at it that way, no time has been wasted. We’re right where we should be. When we she would be.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “Like I said, she is in love with someone else. It’s over.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well, no. There was nothing instant about it. Nothing ‘just like that.’ It has been a painful time. Tremendously painful. And she has a son. My stepson. And we’re close. So it’s complicated. But neither of us is right for the other anymore. We both belong with…other people. She sees that as much as I do.”

  “But I just got engaged. I’m planning my wedding.”

  “Eagerly?”

  “Yes, eagerly,” she lied. “Enthusiastically and excitedly and everything else.”

  And then Henry said, “I will walk away from you, right now, if you can tell me, right now, that you feel the same way about Paul as you do about me. If you can tell me that he makes you feel like you have come home. If you can tell me that, when you are with him, you feel like you have spent lifetimes together before this one. That there is an easiness but also an energy with him that makes no sense but that is so real that it keeps pulling you back here, whether it’s in your car or on your skis or on your feet. There is something happening here, Olivine. To me. And I will say no more words and I will go away right now if you can tell me that it isn’t happening to you.”

  As he spoke, something bright and still coursed through her. She closed her eyes to breathe and to enjoy the silence and the peace and the light that was taking root inside her.

  When she opened her eyes again, Henry’s head was tilted to the side, and his eyebrows were raised. He searched her face, and his voice softened. “Let’s just slow down,” he said. “Let’s just y
ou and I catch up. No pressure. Nothing weird. No speaking of past lifetimes,” he said. “I’m sorry, I got caught in the moment. I promised myself I wouldn’t freak you out. But I know what I know. And I think you know, too.”

  Her head spun once; righted itself. They looked at each other steadily for a long while. And then Henry said, “So can I at least tell you why I left? I promise not to get sentimental on you. But I have to get it out of me before I leave, Olivine, or I’ll never forgive myself. It will be my undoing. Of that I am sure.”

  She was silent.

  He unscrewed the top of the Thermos and his hands shook as he poured her another mug of tea. “Things have not been the way I planned for them. My whole life. This whole life. Nothing in my life has turned out the way it was supposed to. Ever since that day ten years ago when we lay on the floor in that tree house. And then I went away.”

  She looked down into her lap.

  “I know it’s my fault, Olivine. I know it is. And I know that it’s so unfair of me to walk in. Right now. But the idea that you were lost to me, forever…”

  “It’s not so much that you left,” she interrupted. “It was the absoluteness of it. The finality. And the fact that you did it with absolutely no explanation. You disappeared. You vanished. The last thing I remember we were there, in the dark, having what was the most intimate experience of my entire life. It was like I tasted that, that thing that people die for. That look in people’s eyes who have been happily married for years and years and years. That thing my grandparents have. I tasted that. That. It was mine, for a moment. It was indescribable. And then…” She snapped her fingers. “Gone.” She tipped her head back. “Henry, I suspected, for some time, that you had actually died. What else would have made you leave so suddenly? But no, you just went to Idaho. To find a wife.” She choked on the word. She took a deep breath and sat up straighter. “If you knew everything you just said you knew, about us, you wouldn’t have gotten married.”

  “Olivine, I don’t blame you for being angry. At least let me explain what happened.”

  “I’m not angry,” she said, but she was clenched inside, and so she opened herself up once again. She took a deep breath, and she allowed each of the emotions to course through her, and then she said softly, “You were the one thing I was sure about. The one thing that was unlike anything else. I had never wanted to get married, never wanted to commit myself to a man, and then you came along and I couldn’t imagine taking a breath without you. And then, gone. And now…now, I’m finally back to the person I was when you left me. And now you’re here again. And everything is just so...different.”

  “Is it? I still feel it. Bigger, stronger, even, than ever before.”

  She sighed.

  “Sorry, Olivine, but I do.”

  “You don’t even know me, Henry. You knew me for three months when I was twenty-two. I was a kid. A lot has changed. A lot, Henry.”

  “Well, I don’t think things have changed as much as you think.”

  She let silence overtake her once again. And she appreciated how he allowed silence. He didn’t rush in. Finally, he said, “Olivine, I’ve missed you. So much. When I saw you round the corner of the porch that night, it was all I could do not to take you into my arms. It just felt so right that you would just…arrive. That you would find me here. And then to know that you are getting married. Olivine, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for all of it. Just let me explain.”

  Olivine stood then from her canvas chair and, without looking at him, she stretched out on the cold cedar planks of the porch. She drank in the earthiness of the wood. She stared up at the soffit of the porch roof, where it planed into the eave. A skiff of restless snowflakes, dry and skittery, blew in and flitted along her face and eyelashes. She lay her arms straight at her sides so she could feel the biting chill on every part of her, and she focused on letting go of the anger and the frustration and the tension she was feeling. She envisioned herself gathering all of these feelings and clutching them hard in her palm. Forming them into a ball, tight and round. And then she released them, all at once.

  And that is when he came to lay beside her, parallel to her. She could no longer see him, but she could feel him just inches away. She stared up at her grandparents’ wind chimes, the same chimes that had hung there for years, decades. She listened to their rhythmic bonging and she watched them swing, more violently now as the clouds rolled in.

  And when he began to speak, she closed her eyes, and she let his words drift over her. She had waited so long for them that she could almost not believe they were being said. She allowed the cold wood beneath her to ground her, to root her to the world, to remind her that she was alive and real and so was this moment.

  And he told her.

  “When I told you everything, in the tree house, and you accepted me and my pain, and you didn’t try to discuss it or tell me how I should be feeling, but instead, you just absorbed it. You allowed it. When you responded to my deepest pain and guilt and shame, not with words but by taking me inside you, into a quiet and soft place…” he said. “It was the greatest gift anyone had ever given me. And it was one of those moments. It was like I felt the earth shift, and I knew that my life had changed forever. The moment would be ever etched in my mind and my life would never be the same. Olivine, you were so accepting, so kind, so generous. After you made love to me like that, I felt…otherworldly. Almost like I had just died. Lying in that room. So hot. Remember how hot it was?”

  “I remember.” Everything had stopped inside her, and she listened.

  “And when I left I decided I would take that stillness you had given me. And I would go and I would face my mother.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

  “I planned to tell you, to call you as soon as I saw her. But this was something I needed to do on my own. To face her. To reconcile. No matter how angry she was at me for leaving my father that night. And for leaving her right in the midst of her grief. I could face her, and I could make it right. And so I was going to go and to make peace with my mother and then I would call you. And I would tell you how it went.”

  “So? Why didn’t you?”

  “When I got home…” He paused and swallowed hard. “When I got home, I found out she had died.”

  Olivine went cold.

  “And it had happened the night before. During the time we were together.” He was laying flat on his back, next to her, and now he crossed his arm over his eyes, shielding his eyes from her face, from the skittering snow that blew sideways onto the porch. Olivine propped herself up on one arm. All she could see was his lips, fleshy and thick. And his bicep, white and exposed as his arm slung over to cover his face.

  “And all I could think was that I should have been there. I should have believed her. I should have come home earlier.”

  “Oh, Henry,” she said, “How were you to know? There’s no way you could have known.”

  “But there was, Olivine. She told me she was sick. And I didn’t believe her. I left her. In the midst of her grief over my father. I left her.”

  “You can’t blame yourself. You didn’t know. You were dealing with your own things…your own feelings…”

  “I was running away.”

  Olivine was silent.

  “And the shame came back on me. Times ten. And then, once I was away from you, I was so angry with myself. So angry and so guilty and so ashamed. And the memory of you was wrapped up in that. I was with you instead of with my mother. All summer. The entire summer I spent with you was time I should have been spending with my mother. I was so in love with you, and I traded my time with you for my time with her, and I couldn’t forgive myself.” He paused. “Don’t you see, Olivine? My absence was, in some way, responsible for both of my parents’ deaths.” He choked on his words and then he fell silent once again. Finally, he said, “And I think that staying away from you was my way of punishing myself.”

  “Or another means of running away,” she said
softly.

  He paused. Then continued. “When I arrived home, and I found that she was already gone, there was this woman in her bedroom. Her nurse. The hospice nurse she had to hire, Olivine, because I wasn’t there. This nurse was snapping bed sheets onto my mother’s bed when I walked in. And she was so matter-of-fact, so filled with scorn for me. What my mother must have told her about me. ‘Your mother passed last night,’ was all she said, with the iciest tone you can imagine.” He shuddered. “And as the days went on, it destroyed me. Each day, it whittled me down, more and more. I would think about you…so much…and you were always surrounded in this orangey light. I couldn’t imagine you any other way, and then I stopped caring about everything. I lost my ability to care. I saw you as this otherworldly figure who had this kind of hold on me. One that I didn’t understand. The only emotions I was capable of were dark and rooted in self loathing. And so I wandered around in a kind of emotionless cloud. I didn’t deserve you. Or anything else. I didn’t have much to say to anyone, even. I had lost the ability to feel. And you, so full of life.”

  She watched him. Watched his lips move. Unable to find words to say, so she kept silent.

  “Oh, Olivine, if you could have seen me, I would have scared you. You never would have wanted to have anything to do with me.”

  “That’s not possible. How could you imagine I would be so…so small? The thing I wanted most in the world was to care for you.”

  There was a silence then, deep and long. Finally, Henry spoke. “And so some time passed.”

  “Some time?”

  “A year or so, by this point, Olivine. I’m so sorry. I thought every day about coming back, here. Just to see you. Your energy, your life, your light. I felt like I needed to come back. But then I imagined myself just draining you, sucking the very life out of you. I dreamt it. I dreamt that I found you and I put out your light; as soon as you saw me, you just faded. Into nothingness. And I couldn’t do that to another person I loved.” He shook his head. “Trust me, Olivine. It wasn’t the right time for me to come back. To come and find you. You wouldn’t have liked the person I had become.”