Skipping a Beat

by Sarah Pekkanen

  “Sorry,” he said, turning toward me. He gestured toward the glass doors. “I was just watching the deer.”

  I’d never seen deer in our yard before, probably because our gardeners had an arsenal of tricks to keep them from snacking on our manicured flowers and shrubs. I’d once heard them discussing wolves’ urine and foul-tasting chemicals. But the gardeners were gone, and rain must’ve washed away their toxic sprays.

  I walked over to Michael and saw there were at least a dozen animals moving through our yard with the graceful steps of dancers.

  “Look at the little ones,” he whispered. Four fawns, their soft brown coats dotted with snowy spots, rooted their noses into the grass. One chased another to a far corner of the yard, then they raced back, hurdling a row of butterfly bushes with ease. A doe sensed our presence and lifted her head, but after she appraised us, she seemed to decide we weren’t a threat, and she bent her head to eat again.

  “It’s incredible,” I breathed. “There’s this whole other world all around us, and we never noticed it.”

  Michael looked at me but didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t even think for a second that’s an analogy for anything else,” I said, and he laughed. He lifted his arm, as though to put it around me, then he slowly let it drop back to his side.

  I wondered what I would’ve done if he’d tried to hug me. Michael always used to bury his face in my hair when we embraced; it was a habit of his I’d loved. “You switched shampoos,” he said to me once, shortly after we’d started dating. “Now you smell like green apples.” Still reeling from my parents’ abrupt withdrawal, I’d hungered for the way he cherished the tiniest details about me: the mole on my left shoulder, the tiny but stubborn cowlick in the back of my hair, the way my eyes took on the hues of certain shirts I wore.

  I might’ve stopped him if he’d tried to touch me … or maybe I would’ve let myself feel his arms around me again, for a moment. I looked up at his profile and swallowed a sigh.

  This was how it had been with Michael for too long, I thought, suddenly feeling as tired as if I’d been battling insomnia for months. My yearning juxtaposed with anger at him for not giving me more—and at myself for wanting it. Being with him was a constant push and pull. Nothing about our relationship was simple now.

  “I think the deer are leaving,” Michael was saying. “Want to go outside and watch the sun rise?”

  I considered it for a moment. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, and I didn’t feel like being alone. “Sure,” I finally said.

  Still in my pajamas, robe, and slippers, I followed him into our backyard. “Oh, my God,” I said upon catching sight of the rock-lined pond. How could I have forgotten? I ran toward it, grabbed a small plastic container resting between two of the rocks, and reached inside for some pellets. I felt relief as greedy, gaping mouths came to the surface and gobbled up the food. I threw in more pellets and watched them disappear as flashes of orange and white and red and black zipped through the water.

  Michael was staring into the pond, an inscrutable expression on his face. “I didn’t even know we had fish.”

  “Seriously?” I couldn’t believe it. “Michael, we stocked them two years ago.”

  I reached back in my memory, seeing the gardeners approach me about it one morning as I lingered over coffee and the Style section of the Washington Post. Michael wasn’t home, but surely he’d walked by the koi pond sometime in the past two years. It was only fifty or so yards away from our house. He had to have occasionally looked down instead of always staring at the spot in the distance where he wanted to go next, hadn’t he?

  “Move it, Pugsley,” I ordered, tossing in another handful. “You’ve had enough.”

  Michael grinned. “You named them?”

  I looked over my shoulder at him. It was a small secret, but I felt reluctant revealing it. He was suddenly so eager to know everything about me, and perversely, his eagerness made me want to hold back. It was my way of punishing him for not being interested before, I realized. I wanted to show him the distance between us wasn’t that easy to bridge; I wasn’t that easy. Finally I shrugged and kept my voice light: “The littlest one is Nemo, and that pretty one with the long fins is Cinderella. Pugsley is the breakfast hog.”

  “Speaking of breakfast, want to eat out here? I could bring us a tray.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, “but I could use something to drink.”

  “Coffee?” Michael asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m more in a juice mood.”

  “Be right back.” Michael lightly jogged toward the house as I looked after him. For years my husband hadn’t touched a stove, laundered a sock, or filled a tank of gas. Now he was my personal cabana boy.

  I heard a little splash and tossed another pellet into the water. “Just one more, Pugsley,” I warned. I never could resist his puffed-out cheeks. He looked like a toddler who was threatening to hold his breath until he got his way. “But after this, you need to clean your room, understand?”

  Pugsley eyed me, then swam off with a shake of his tail that I interpreted as fish-speak for “Make me!” I grabbed the net by the side of the pond and skimmed the leaves and sticks from the surface. See, this was why Pugsley never listened; he knew I’d cave and do his chores for him.

  After a few minutes, I spotted Michael coming toward me, clutching two bottles of DrinkUp and carrying a plate covered in aluminum foil.

  “Provisions!” he announced as he got closer to me. “I brought some croissants and jam in case you changed your mind. Sorry I took so long. Dale called when I was inside.”

  “What did he want?” I reflexively wrinkled my nose, as if a bad smell had just wafted by on a breeze.

  “It isn’t important,” Michael said. “Even if Dale thinks it is.”

  “Is something up with the company?” I asked casually. I picked up the net again and began clearing some imaginary leaves.

  “A former employee is complaining about something. It’s nothing. Dale said he’s just trying to get some money. Let’s not let it interfere with the day. Some lemonade?” He held up a bottle.

  Interesting, I thought as I slowly nodded. It was strange that Dale had called about something so inconsequential. Dale was the company’s top attorney, and he had a vested interest in seeing that Michael stuck around, since Dale might be out of a job after Michael left. Could Dale be casting around for excuses to lure Michael back to work?

  Maybe, I mused as I sipped the lemonade I’d helped taste-test to perfection in our tiny kitchen so many years ago, Dale could turn into an unexpected ally.

  “What are you thinking about?” Michael asked. “You’re a million miles away.”

  “Hmmm …?” As I looked up at him, our herb garden caught my eye. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s find some fresh mint to put in the lemonade.”

  “Good idea.” Michael followed me to the little patch lined with straight green rows. “Is that it?” He pointed to a cluster of stalks that shot up straight into the air.

  I shook my head. “That’s lavender.”

  Michael dropped to his knees and leaned close to the plant and took in a deep breath. “Julia, have you smelled this stuff? It’s incredible!” I thought about telling him the gardeners used to cut fresh stalks and put them in a vase in our bedroom all the time, but I refrained.

  “I can’t believe how good this smells,” Michael said, his eyes shut. He stayed there for a long moment, inhaling and smiling like the poster boy for the Get High on Life campaign. He was wearing old jeans and a faded Georgetown University longsleeved shirt, and his hair was growing out into wild curls; somehow it made him look like a college student again. Like the Michael I used to adore. I’d felt numb toward my husband for so long; now he was conjuring such sharp emotions in me that it felt like the ground beneath my feet was constantly shifting.

  Finally Michael stood up and pulled a smaller, shinier leaf from a plant in the next row over and rubbed it between h
is fingers. “What’s this one?”

  I leaned in for a sniff. “Basil. And here’s the mint.” I tore off a few sprigs and handed one to him. He dropped it into his bottle, then led me to a nearby hammock that was strung between two strong poplar trees.

  “Want to sit for a bit?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  He held the side steady for me as I climbed in. We nearly tipped over when Michael got on, and I clung to the side of the hammock until we stabilized. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” he said, stretching out his legs. “Do you like your job—I mean really like it?”

  “Of course,” I said without even having to think about it.

  His brow had been furrowed, but it smoothed out with my answer. “Good,” he breathed. “What was the best party you ever threw? I don’t mean the fanciest one, or the most expensive. Just the one you liked the best.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, hanging one of my legs over the hammock’s side and using my toes to push off against the ground and swing us back and forth.

  “Come on, I really want to hear it,” he said.

  There wasn’t any reason not to tell him, other than to punish him by denying him the conversations he’d once withheld from me. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty appealing reason, even if it did make me feel about as mature as Pugsley.

  “There were so many of them,” I finally said, casually crossing my arms behind my head, as if I’d only been sorting through my memories during the long pause. “I guess I can rule out weddings. There’s always some battle leading up to the day, between the mother and the bride, or maybe if the parents are divorced and remarried, there’s drama about the photos and who gets to sit where. And sometimes relatives get upset if they’re not allowed to bring kids…. I don’t know, it seems like there’s always something. The day itself can be magical—”

  I smiled as I thought of something.

  “Tell me,” Michael said.

  “Whenever the bride starts to walk down the aisle, everyone turns to look at her. But I never do,” I said. “I look at the people surrounding her. There’s so much hope and love in the room. Sometimes there’s an older couple reaching for one another’s hands at the exact same moment, or the father of the bride trying to choke back tears—”

  Michael was staring at me.

  I cleared my throat, feeling inexplicably annoyed at him. And at myself, for letting him in even this much. “Anyway, weddings are great, but I can’t ever forget all the stress leading up to them.”

  “Anniversary parties?” Michael asked. “Are they any better?”

  “Usually,” I said. “By then everyone has mellowed out. But nothing’s jumping out at me as a favorite. Let me think …”

  I reached back for the memory. “There was this family reunion,” I began, then I looked up at the sky and frowned. The clouds were thin and gray, and the air held a hint of winter, which was less than a month away; it felt like a storm was coming.

  Michael was watching me intently, as if my favorite celebration was significant in some way only he knew.

  “The family reunion,” he prodded.

  “It was for three brothers, who all lived really far apart,” I began again, getting caught up in the images of that day despite myself. “They’d grown up in Virginia, and one still lived there, but another had moved to England and one was all the way in Australia. Anyhow, they’d all gotten married and had kids, and somehow time just slipped away from them. They wrote holiday cards and called, but they hadn’t seen each other in years. They wanted to reconnect, with each other and with their families. So they invited everyone—their parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and new in-laws—and it ended up being forty people.

  “They were my easiest clients ever, but that’s not the only reason why they were the best. They didn’t care about the food or the decorations, they just wanted to be together and have fun. So before I planned anything, I called them up one by one and asked about their memories of growing up. They had this great childhood. They were outside all the time, playing stickball and kick the can and football. There was a creek behind their house where they went fishing every weekend, even though they never once caught anything. I’m not even sure there were fish in that creek. But it wasn’t about the fish; it was about the three of them, digging for worms and casting their lines into the water and catching fireflies in jelly jars when it turned dark. Once they even tried to make a raft, like Huckleberry Finn. It sank before they’d gotten ten feet away from shore.”

  Michael laughed.

  “I rented a National Park building—really more of a cabin—that was surrounded by picnic tables and outdoor grills and soccer and baseball fields. We brought in stuff for old-fashioned games, like three-legged races and horseshoes and softball. Then we served up giant bowls of buttered corn on the cob and watermelon wedges and hot dogs and burgers. When it got dark, all the kids hunted for sticks and made s’mores over the grills. Most of the adults did, too.”

  “Were the brothers happy?” Michael asked. “Were they able to find each other again?”

  I nodded. “I hired a photographer, and she took pictures all day long. I made copies of one and gave it to each of them afterward. It shows the three of them toward the end of the day, and they’re standing together in front of the fire. She shot them from the back, and the one in the middle had his arms draped around each of his brothers. I paired it with a photo of them as kids and gave them all framed copies.”

  “After all those years, nothing had really changed, had it?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t know when they’ll see each other again,” I said, and the thought saddened me. “The one in Australia—his wife is from Sydney, and her family all lives there. Their kids are in school and they’ve set down roots. I doubt they’ll move. The brother who lives in England was talking about maybe getting transferred back to the U.S. sometime, but who knows if it’ll happen. I just—I wanted to give them that one day. Maybe it will be enough for them, for the next five or ten years.”

  “I wish I’d had that, with my brothers,” Michael said softly.

  I looked at him, shocked. Michael didn’t talk about his brothers or family, not ever.

  He looked down at his hands and absently rubbed at a smear of dirt on his palm, then lifted his eyes to mine. “Did I ever tell you what I did the day after my company’s stock went public?” he asked. “I had all these reporters calling to interview me, and my day was stacked with meetings. Everyone wanted a piece of me. But I made them all wait. I told my secretary to hold my calls and not let anyone into my office, no matter how urgent they said it was. Then I sat down at my desk and took out my checkbook and I wrote my brothers and my parents one check apiece. But not big checks. I gave them each a thousand bucks. And every month after that, I sent them checks, too, always for the same amount. A thousand dollars.”

  He took in a breath, then continued. “I took my time signing them, and I addressed the envelopes by hand. I put them into the mailbox myself on the first of every month and watched them drop in, one at a time. I wanted my family to be reminded as often as possible that I’d done better than them. That I was the only success story in the family. And I wanted them to worry that the checks might suddenly stop coming. That’s why I didn’t send a bigger amount; I wanted them to depend on me, to realize that if they bought a new car or a couch or something, I was all over it. I wanted to be in their faces as much as possible, without being around them.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know how to respond.

  “I didn’t tell you because part of me was ashamed,” he said. “I was pretending to help them out, but it was really all about my ego. I mean, when I signed the checks, I even made my signature bigger than usual. It was like, ‘Let’s see you bastards ignore me now.’”

  We’d tried so hard to leave West Virginia behind, but we’d failed, I realized. Moving on requires more than a change in geography. As hard as Michael worked,
as much as we acquired, our past had been with us all along, breathing over our shoulders and watching our every move. It was a third person in our relationship, and just like any interloper in a marriage, it had driven us apart.

  “Are you going to get in touch with them again?” I asked.

  Michael shook his head. “I wrote them all letters explaining everything with a final check. And I set up college accounts for their kids. But they haven’t called me. Maybe they’re angry they won’t get any more money. Maybe they don’t know what to say. I don’t know, but I’m not going to worry about it.

  “The only person I want to focus on is you,” he said simply.

  Damn it, I’d forgotten this; how being with Michael both energized and relaxed me. How the passing hours grew light and slippery as we talked. He’d lulled me in, somehow, and made me forget everything while we talked. But now the uncertainty of our future came rushing back, stronger than ever.

  “What if I can’t ever forgive you for giving everything away?” I asked. Keep calm, I instructed myself. Don’t argue with him; just plant seeds to make him doubt what he’s doing.

  “I know you don’t see things the same way I do. I think it would be impossible for you to, without experiencing what I did. I just want us to be together without worrying about money for a while.”

  I felt my nails bite into my palms.

  “I’m not getting there,” I told him. “What you’re doing is making me focus on money more, not less.”

  “Julia, I know what this is costing you,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I know you better than anyone—at least I used to. I hope I get to know you that way again. And maybe I’m not doing this perfectly, but it’s the only way I know how.”

  I started to say something, then abruptly glanced up at the sky as it rumbled a warning. “It’s going to rain.”

  “But look.” Michael pointed up to the trees. The thick, leafy branches provided a canopy over our hammock. “We’re completely protected.”

  “You want to stay out here?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Stay with me?”