Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  “Are you sure this is a good plan?” asked Gita as I was walking out the door.

  I thought about what Charlie had said about even the best-laid plans being unreliable. “No,” I said. “But it’s the one I’m willing to take a risk on.”

  Jillian Smith had agreed to meet me at a teahouse on Randolph Street near Millennium Park. I arrived early and took a seat near the window, hoping to get a glimpse of her before she saw me.

  A young woman with a dancer’s carriage walked in and glanced around. I expected her eyes to land on me with recognition, but she got in line to order. Then a woman with thin braids and a smattering of artful tattoos running up and down her right arm came rushing through the door. She looked nothing like the public policy expert I had in mind, but surely she could have made Adam feel youthful and alive. Yet she paid no attention to me as she ordered her tea, and left without a backward glance. Other people drifted in and out: a herd of teen boys, a middle-aged woman, two women who looked to be in their seventies. Jillian had agreed to meet me at eleven thirty, but my phone informed me it was almost eleven forty-five. Had I been stood up?

  “Hello?” The middle-aged woman was standing in front of me. I wondered if she was going to ask to share my table, as people occasionally did when a café was crowded. I hated to sit in close quarters with a stranger, but as I glanced around, I realized there were more than a few empty tables available.

  “I’m Jillian Smith,” said the woman. “Are you Maggie?”

  I almost fainted. Then I stood abruptly, sending my chair tumbling backward behind me. I turned around to pick it up, my cheeks burning. “Excuse me, sorry,” I mumbled.

  Only then did I allow myself to really look at her. She was short, with a lean build and no discernible curves. Her hair was red with some gray woven throughout. And her face—her face! We looked nothing alike, Jillian Smith and I. But with the fine lines in her forehead and around her mouth, the sunspots on her cheeks, and more than anything, the look in her eyes, which had surely seen far more than thirty years of life: she was me.

  This was the woman who had made my husband feel alive?

  “Hi,” I said. “Thank you so much for meeting me.”

  “Sure.” She looked as nervous as I felt. “Are you in the mood for tea?”

  “Not really,” I admitted.

  “Me neither. Why don’t we take a walk? We could head over to Millennium Park.”

  Perhaps this was a trick, and she was going to wait until we were sandwiched between tourists, then retrieve a weapon from her woven handbag and shank me before disappearing into the throng. But I agreed; after all, it had been my idea to meet in the first place, and in her khaki shorts and Birkenstock sandals, Jillian Smith did not strike me as the stabby type.

  As we made our way toward the park, a man walking in the opposite direction jostled Jillian as he rushed past and continued on without apologizing. Jillian shook her head with disgust. “God. People are the worst.” She glanced at me quickly, probably having realized that as Adam’s ex-paramour, she could very well fall into the “worst people” category. But I found myself smiling in recognition, and without thinking to censor myself, I said, “Especially if you’re a woman of a certain age.”

  “Isn’t that the truth,” she agreed.

  “Adam said you were thirty,” I blurted, recalling the uncertainty in his voice when he told me this. At the time, I thought he was hesitating because he was embarrassed. Lo and behold, he was lying. I wondered why, of all things, he felt compelled to fib about her age.

  “I haven’t been thirty in seventeen years,” she said, dodging another man barreling at us. “He probably told you that so if you went looking for me, you’d find the wrong person.”

  That was highly likely. And yet her being younger than me, if only by seven years, was momentarily soothing. Then I realized I was still looking for reasons to justify Adam’s behavior, when the point was not to rationalize it, but to understand it.

  When we reached the park, Jillian pointed. “How about we walk toward the Bean?”

  I nodded, and we walked in silence. We reached the great silver structure and stood and admired it for a minute. Then, without discussing our plan, we walked to Crown Fountain. The two towering fountains were lit with images of people’s faces. A mix of children and adults frolicked through the shallow pool of water, sending its cool spray onto my skin.

  “Why did you agree to meet with me?” I asked.

  “Guilt,” said Jillian, still staring out at the water. Then she turned and looked at me carefully. “I guess I wanted to meet the woman who Adam had spent most of his life with, too.”

  “Here I am. So you were crazy about him, huh?”

  “Was and am, though it’s over,” she said wistfully. “I used to see him at the Starbucks around the block from my work—both of us seemed to take coffee breaks around the same time—and there was something about him that made me feel like I had to get to know him. I started chatting him up, and . . .” The color in her cheeks made her look like a child with a fever. “I didn’t know he was married at first. He never wore a ring, at least not that I noticed. Later, I found out he sometimes forgot to put it back on after he worked out. It wasn’t deliberate—though his flirting with me was.”

  The flirting comment stung, but I was fixated on her comment about his ring. When Adam and I had still been married, I had never forgotten to put my eternity band back on. Then again, I had stopped taking it off altogether, even when I was washing dishes or doing something that might damage it. Different actions, same sort of carelessness.

  Jillian continued. “By the time he told me, we had already met for coffee several times, and I had fallen hard for him. Believe me, I knew it was wrong—not only the cheating, but also that he had waited to tell me he wasn’t available. I guess love can make you blind.”

  “So you’re not married, too?”

  Jillian shook her head. “I was for a few good years in my thirties, and then after a few bad years, we got divorced. After that, I never wanted to marry again. But Adam . . . I was nuts about him. And he was nuts about you.”

  I laughed bitterly. “Right. So nuts he decided to cheat on me.”

  “Maggie, barring an act of God, I have the feeling you and I will never see each other again, and I know you want answers, so I’ll cut to the chase. Adam was having a midlife crisis. I knew that from the minute he admitted he was married. He was attracted to me, for sure, and I was so crazy about him that I was able to pretend that he wasn’t just spending time with me to boost his ego. Have you ever had an affair before?”

  “No,” I said curtly.

  “Well, it’s intoxicating. But Adam was already gone long before I allowed myself to admit that I was a cipher.” She knelt and ran her hand through the water, then pressed it to her cheeks and her chest. “You should probably know that I don’t regret it. I know that’s awful, and it’s mine to live with. But there was this period of time—after Adam and I began seeing each other and before I realized he didn’t love me and never would—that was so magical to me that the rest was all worth it. Adam was smart and interesting and he made my life better, if that makes sense.”

  It did.

  “I had never fallen in love with someone like that before. I’m glad I didn’t die without knowing what that was like.” She paused. “Why did you want to meet me, Maggie?”

  I, too, bent to put my hands in the water, mostly because I needed a moment before I responded to her. I would never tell her that it was because I needed to see who she was, and why she had made Adam feel alive. Anyway, now I had my answer: she had looked at him with fresh eyes.

  I stood and wiped my hands on my dress. “Adam asked me to come back to him—to remarry him. We divorced in January.”

  “I gathered that from you saying you were his ex-wife. I’m sorry.”

  “Right.” A couple of young women were standing just to our right, pretending to talk but clearly eavesdropping. Let them, I thought
. Maybe they’ll learn a thing or two about how not to make a mess of their lives. “He said he loves me and will never hurt me again.”

  “And because he lied to you about other things, you needed proof that he wasn’t lying about our affair,” she said.

  “Yes.” We looked at each other.

  “It’s the truth,” she said after a moment. “I wish it weren’t, but it is. Adam seemed depressed about work and his father’s death. At the end of our affair, if you can call it that—”

  “You can.”

  She pursed her lips and nodded. “He started getting this deer-in-headlights look. I think he was scared half to death about what he’d done, and felt like he had to follow through, or then it all would have been for nothing. I don’t think he ever actually stopped loving you; it was more like he set you aside in his mind and then felt like he had to stick with it.”

  Jillian reminded me of Charlie, the way she didn’t hesitate to say what she was thinking. If we had met under different circumstances, she might have been a friend.

  “Adam’s a great man, Maggie,” she said.

  Yes, he is, I thought with a mix of melancholy and joy. He was fallible, but he was a good man.

  “I hope this has been helpful,” she added.

  It was time for us to part, so I thanked her, and then she thanked me for being gracious, and I laughed and said it was gracious of her to call my setup gracious. Before going our separate ways, Jillian hugged me goodbye, which was at once strange and touching.

  As I walked back to the train alone, I thought about what Jillian had said—how the magical times with Adam had made the pain of losing him worth it.

  I knew the magic she spoke of. There was our first date at a Thai restaurant, where we had barely been able to eat, because we were too busy staring at each other over the table, or our honeymoon in Sonoma, when we spent hours in bed each day. Better still were the wonderfully mundane moments after we had settled into our marriage, like the way he would call me five minutes after leaving for work to say he missed me, or how he fell asleep with a leg slung over mine.

  More than all of that, though, I had loved knowing I was not alone in the world. When Zoe screamed that she hated me at the top of her lungs, I had Adam to comfort me. After my mother died, Adam assured me that though she was gone, he was still there. He loved me more than life itself, he had told me, and I knew this to be true.

  As I reached the L, I could hear a train approaching. I rushed through the turnstile and ran down the stairs, but it was too late. By the time I hit the platform, the train was pulling out of the station. As I waited for the next one, my mind returned to Adam.

  For a long time, I thought he had left because of me, or at least because of a shortcoming in our marriage. But Jillian had confirmed that his decision to leave had largely been the by-product of his own internal crisis.

  He swore he would never hurt me again, but to believe this was to believe he would never suffer another crisis of that magnitude. There were no guarantees; I understood that now. All the so-called proof in the world could not prove Adam would remain loyal and provide the new relationship he had promised.

  Was a lack of certainty reason enough to turn down a second shot at the life Adam and I had spent three decades creating together?

  THIRTY

  There is something about struggle that changes you in irrevocable ways. I had spent more than a year waiting to feel like myself again, but as I packed my bags the day before Jean was to return from Italy, it occurred to me that I would never again be the version of myself that I had been searching for. Instead, the separation and divorce had reduced me to the very essence of who I was. As I passed before the antique mirror in Jean’s bedroom, I understood that this reduction had not made me weak—though I had certainly felt that way at times—but far stronger, like a sheet of metal that had been hammered into a solid, unbreakable sphere.

  I was glad to be leaving town this way, even if I felt ambivalent about my departure. I would miss Jean’s house: her paintings and wacky survival novels, her yard and neighborhood, even the quiet. And I would miss Second Chance and Felicia, as well as the divorce support group, even if it had never felt the same after Charlie stopped going. I had not called him, though I’d considered it a few dozen times; after all, he knew I was taking off at the beginning of August, and he had not reached out to me. Our parting at the park had been final.

  After I had packed everything but my toiletries and a change of clothing, I went outside to the small garden I had planted and called Rose.

  “Maggie!” exclaimed Rose. “I’m so sorry about the other day.”

  “Oh, Rose. It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize.” She was referring to the previous Sunday, when I had stopped to see her on my way out of Chicago. Our visit had started off well enough, but she had quickly grown agitated—I would say unusually so, but dementia was fast turning an unflaggingly polite woman into one who became angry at the slightest provocation.

  “Maggie, what is this hellhole?” she had said, looking around with disgust as we sat on her sofa. At her neurologist’s urging, she had just moved out of her apartment and into a single room on the opposite side of the building, which was a traditional nursing home. And in that moment, she didn’t recognize where she was, which was precisely why her doctor had wanted her to move right away. Because of her dementia, the longer she waited to make a change, the harder it would be for her to adjust.

  “It’s not so bad, Rose,” I had said, trying to soothe her. The room was spacious and decorated with some of her furniture. Nonetheless, it was still just a generic beige box with a hospital-style bathroom, and Rose’s perfume could not mask the nursing home smell that permeated the air.

  “It’s a death sentence,” she muttered. Then she had gotten up from the sofa and, with much effort, gotten into bed fully clothed, kitten heels and all. I had sat by her bedside for a while until she told me to leave. “There’s nothing you can do for me, Heather,” she muttered. “Go home.”

  She had mistaken me for the daughter-in-law she didn’t like, and I had been crushed. And when I checked in a few days later, she was having “another bad day,” she told me, and asked me to call another time.

  Standing in Jean’s yard, I was relieved to hear that Rose again sounded like the woman I had known and loved all these years. “Rose,” I said, bending to pull a dandelion that had sprouted next to a tomato plant, “that’s part of the reason why I’m calling. You had a really rough time that day. I’m not sure if you remember, but you got in bed with your shoes on and told me to leave.”

  “Oh my word. I hope you know I didn’t mean it.”

  I yanked another weed and tossed it in the pile I had started at the garden’s edge. “Of course I do. But I think you and I should have another conversation about your treatment plan.”

  She let out a long sigh. “Bad enough that I’m losing my mind, but to actually know it’s happening is worse. I wish it had happened all at once. Like an explosion—so I never knew what hit me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said quietly. My other mother, as I thought of Rose, was leaving my life, one stolen moment at a time. I bit my lip, then willed myself to say it: “Forgive me, Rose, but I have to ask you to please, please consider taking the medication your neurologist recommended.”

  “There’s no saying if it will work,” she said crisply, and I could just imagine her tilting her chin up the way she did when she felt she was right. “Knowing that, why would I subject myself to side effects?”

  I bent down to pull another dandelion. “We all know it’s not a cure, but if it meant even a few more happy days—just a little more joy—wouldn’t it be worth it?”

  She didn’t respond, and I wondered if perhaps I had crossed a line. But then she said, “Okay.”

  I had been about to pull a ripe tomato from its vine, and I froze, my hand on the tomato’s taut flesh. “Okay?”

  “I’ll try the pills.”

  I let go
of the tomato and pumped my fist into the air. “Oh, Rose. Thank you. This is going to mean so much to Adam. It means so much to me.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I just hope it works, at least a little.”

  Later, I stood in the kitchen, cutting one of the tomatoes I had picked while wrapping up my conversation with Rose. I salted a slice and took a bite. Its juice trickled down my chin, and I wiped it away with a dishcloth, savoring the sweet, acidic taste on my tongue. It was so much better than the hothouse tomatoes I bought at the grocery store. If I had known that earlier, maybe I would have started a garden in Oak Valley. Gardening, like traveling on my own and biking, was one of those things that had always sounded like a good idea but that I had never actually gotten around to.

  Well, I was doing them now, I thought with pride, staring out the window at the plot that was overflowing with the tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, and chives I had planted.

  It hit me, then, how many other things I could still learn and try. How many other chances I wanted to take, even if it meant risking failure. Rose had been right. On some counts, at least, there was still time.

  After finishing the last bite of tomato, I wiped my face and washed my hands. Then I retrieved my computer from one of my suitcases, sat down with it at Jean’s table, and began to write.

  Dear Adam,

  I saw your mother when I was in Chicago last weekend. I’m sorry to say that it did not go well. As her neurologist predicted, the move to the single room was confusing and upsetting to her. (She called me Heather.) Her dementia is getting worse, and even though I’m not her biological daughter, that is so damn hard to witness.

  But when I called her this morning and discovered she was her old coherent self, I asked her—yet again—to consider medication. I explained how much it would mean to me and to you, and to my amazement, she agreed to give it a try. I believe she meant it and, provided she is lucid, that she’ll remember agreeing to it. Could you please make an appointment for her to see Dr. Niall? I’ll keep checking in with her, but it would help if you and Rick continue to encourage her.