The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  His voice has taken on an edge I don’t like. I can’t help myself; I lean forward and say, “Do you want to know the honest-to-God truth? The real story? What actually happened is that I ended up falling in love with him. In the way I should have, probably, before I married him.”

  He lets those words hang in the air for a moment before he says, “Well, that’s good to hear. It turned out perfectly for you, then.”

  “Yes. It did. It actually worked out. Who would’ve thunk?”

  “Who, indeed?”

  “And … what about you? How was it … for you and Carly?”

  He rolls his eyes. “How was it for me and Carly? Now that is an interesting question, and one that would require a more serious, involved answer than I am prepared to give this afternoon when I have not been so good about going to my therapist lately. May I get back to you on that?”

  “No,” I say cheerfully. “Actually, it’s now or never.”

  “Now or never, huh? And why is that?”

  “Because I’m not going to see you again.”

  His eyes widen. “What?”

  “Yeah. This is it. It’s just a little break, a time-out from our usual lives.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes. You didn’t know that? You thought I was going to go and explain to Grant that you and I are going to strike up a friendship now, and maybe he’d like to join us? The three of us could have dinner sometime, perhaps. Talk about old times.”

  “What? You don’t think that would be fun?” he says and makes his eyes go round and innocent. Then he grabs my hand again. “Oh my God, Annabelle, I’ve missed you so much. If you aren’t a minx, I don’t know what you are. I’ve gotta tell you something—since I now find out the shocking news that I’m not ever going to get another chance.” He lowers his voice because a man has taken the table right next to ours and, inches away from us, is opening a paper bag with a muffin inside. “Do you know that I can’t even read that book of mine anymore, because all I can see when I read certain parts of it is you and me, in bed, writing the damn thing?”

  You and me in bed, he says. And something electric goes through me, which he notices, with some amusement. I see the satisfaction in his eyes. Nobody is going to tell him that I fell in love with Grant McKay.

  “The love story part,” he says. “Did it … well, did it make you remember?”

  I’d read the book in the library, I tell him. I’d take the children for story hour, and then as soon as they were settled, I’d go upstairs to the place I’d hidden it in the stacks. Sometimes someone would have found it and taken it back to the New Fiction section, where just anyone could see it and check it out. I don’t tell him that once I couldn’t find it for three days, and I was worried that somebody had taken it out and I’d have to wait—and what if it was a person like me who keeps books for however long I want to? But then I found it again. Somebody had shelved it wrong. I remember the day I read the ending, when the couple broke up. It hadn’t been that way when he’d read it to me before. I’d had to lean against the shelves because my heart was beating so hard.

  He’s smiling. “Us in bed. At—what was her name?—Lynn’s house?”

  Oh yes. “Linnea.”

  “Ah, Linnea. Saint among women. How many toasts have I drunk in my life to Linnea and her lovely bed. I still mention her nightly in my prayers of gratitude.”

  “But with the wrong name, apparently.”

  “In prayers of gratitude, it’s the essence that counts. Don’t you know that?” He takes a sip of his coffee and whispers, “I love the idea of you reading my book in the stacks while your children hear stories downstairs. I wish I could have known that was happening. I wish I could have reached you.”

  “Yes. Me, too, you.”

  I know it’s all over my face how much I have held on to him, that he might even know about the dreams I’ve had of him at night, about the way his face would suddenly appear before me at any time at all through the years—while changing diapers, washing dishes, even making love to Grant.

  He grins at me and pushes his hair back off his forehead and sighs. The novel embarrasses him now, he says, with all that sentimentality. He can’t bear to read it. “It was, ah, a symptom of the times, shall we say?” he says. “All that bullshit trauma, the sabbatical, the difficulty in the marriage, the adjustment to having little kids rampaging through the house, dismantling the place brick by brick. You know, I was about as crazy as a person can be and still be at large. Those years … I mean, what was I thinking?” He holds up his hands, appealing to the heavens, and says, “I was stupid.”

  I sip my tea and feel a flush spreading across me. This is a dance we’re doing. I’ve thrown down the gauntlet by saying I’m in love with Grant, and Jeremiah is setting out to show me that he can still get to me. Just watch, in a moment, he’ll punish me by saying that I, too, was just a symptom of his stupidity, and then after a few more minutes of strained but otherwise polite and ambiguous conversation, we’ll say good-bye and I won’t see him again. But at least I’ll know how to file away that whole period of my life. The good part will be that I won’t need to hold on to those dreams that I realize I have always seen as a kind of message from my unconscious, from my soul, this guarded place that I have let Jeremiah be in charge of.

  But the bad part will be that everything will have been diminished, made small.

  Which, damn it, it was. It was small. I have been so idiotic, seeing those days writ so large, giving them such importance. Calling that affair my soul. Going to the library to read that book, even Googling his name—all that was making more of it than it really was, a ridiculous dalliance he took on when he was screwed up beyond belief and was rebelling. The truth was, I was a little shit of a wife, a cheating spoiled baby who luckily found herself forgiven by her husband. And I should get down on my knees and thank my lucky stars that I got out so unscathed. Run back now. Now.

  I feel for my purse strap and am about to stand up and make some excuse when he leans forward and touches my arm. His eyes see down to the heart of me.

  “Annabelle, I just want you to know that the loss of you was something I never got over. It was the worst mistake I ever made. I may not get another chance to tell you.”

  Don’t look. Look away. Now.

  “But you really are happy, aren’t you?” he says. “I mean, happy in that overarching sense.”

  I nod and then shrug. Shake my head. Yes. No. I can’t speak.

  He’s smiling, still leaning so close to me that it’s all I can do not to reach over and run my hands along that stubbled jawline of his that used to make me so crazy. “It actually helps me, knowing that you didn’t suffer so much after you spun away from me that last day.” He shakes his head, puts down his coffee cup, and sighs. “For such a long time, I guess I wasn’t sure we were going to survive all that love.”

  I put my hand up to shield my eyes as tears start to fall, and he says, “Oh, no! Oh, don’t, please, please …”

  I jump up and pull my hand away. “Stop. Let’s not go into all that now! I can’t talk about it,” I say, more loudly than I realized, and I can’t help it, I’m crying now for real. “I don’t want to cry,” I whisper hoarsely. Jeremiah stands up, too, and leans over and dabs at my face with the napkin he’s holding, and I jerk away from him and say, “No!” Too loudly.

  The man with the muffin looks up. His paper is practically touching my hip.

  I put my hands over my face.

  “No, talk about it. Tell me. If this is the only time we’ll have, we need to talk about it,” says Jeremiah in a low, urgent voice, standing next to me and pulling me toward him. “Let’s get out of here, okay? Come to my place.”

  “I don’t want—I can’t leave with you,” I say. “I need to go—to go back to Sophie’s. I want to get away.” I must look so foolish, with mascara going everywhere on my face, and my voice so shaky and ragged.

  “But you’re not okay. Stay with me a little longer. Let’s
talk this through. This is our only chance. Here. Why don’t we walk?”

  Outside, the sun is weak and watery, and there are puddles everywhere with little chips of ice still in them. “Let’s just take one of those walks like we used to,” he says. “Nothing heavy or sad. Remember that year we pushed the kids in their strollers for miles and miles while we tried to figure out your career and my book and why we didn’t want to do the things that everybody thought we were supposed to do?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Those walks maybe saved my life.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Yeah. And look at us, here again. On a one-day-only free pass. Amazing, really, when you think about it.”

  So I go with him. We walk for blocks and blocks, and it’s crazy how familiar and right it seems. Like we’re outside of time. On vacation from real life. He takes my hand, and that’s okay, too. We keep smiling at each other, without talking, and I can’t get over it, that I’m here with him and how funny he makes everything. It’s okay, really. He’s the same, and we don’t have to wade back through all that shit; it’s enough to be here with him this minute, and that’s what I want to tell him. That we really don’t need anything more than this because it’s enough to get me through the next twenty-six years and however many months and weeks and hours, and I’m wondering if he really did figure that up or was that something he just made up, but when I turn to him to say that, he stops walking and pulls me over next to the building, and then his mouth is covering mine and we are kissing like it’s 1979 and not one second has passed.

  He tastes of coffee and sweetness and something that is unmistakably familiar and known and real, more real than anything else I’ve been through since. He is in my blood; he has always been in my blood. And it’s like all the times before when we kissed in public and everything went all hallelujah in my head, those times in the park when we took the kids on the swings, and the times when we raced home and jumped on each other in bed, or tore off to Linnea’s house, laughing as we unlocked her door and, often as not, falling down on the floor in the entryway, kissing and rolling around on her Turkish rug and never making it to the bedroom. And maybe it’s been only an hour since those days have passed, and these are the kisses that have lived on in those dreams—and maybe they are dreams; maybe I’ll wake up and think, Oh, I had one of those Jeremiah dreams, but this one was in a Starbucks! And so when he says, “I live not far from here; will you come home with me?” I am helplessly ready to go with him, because I am no longer the sad Annabelle who has run away from home, I am the old Annabelle, and I need this. It is, in fact, rightfully mine.

  I am about to say all the yeses that are in my head—but then my cell phone rings in the pocket of my coat, blaring out the first notes of “Thriller,” which Sophie thought would be a funny trick, and I jump in midair as though I’ve been caught and am plunged right back in the present.

  “Uh-oh, pregnancy alert? Could this be it?” says Jeremiah under his breath, close to me, but we pull apart as I take the phone out of my pocket. It’s not Sophie, thank God. It’s Nicky, and I shrug at Jeremiah and say, “Other kid,” and answer it.

  He’s talking through a crackly connection; either that or he’s eating something. His voice is maddeningly lazy and casual. It brings me back to reality. “Hey, Mom. I’ve got a question. Did Dad pay for next semester already?”

  This is the kid—it’s funny, really—who had an unerring sixth sense for knowing when Grant and I were making love. Let Grant so much as touch my breast in the middle of the night, and there would be Nicholas, materializing from out of nowhere in his fleecy sleeper, sucking his thumb and demanding to be put between us in bed. “He’s returning to the scene of his origins,” Grant used to say. “It’s like the swallows returning to Capistrano.”

  And now here he is, driven by some blind instinct to preserve the sanctity of our marriage, perhaps. I can’t think. “Why are you asking me this?” I say. “What’s wrong?”

  “I dunno. I’m just thinking maybe I’d like to take some time off, go traveling or something,” he says. “If he didn’t pay, I was thinking maybe I’ll just take the money he was going to pay and go to Europe next semester. Backpacking. Doesn’t that sound cool?”

  “Wait. Backpacking? Instead of college?” I say. I roll my eyes at Jeremiah and he laughs. He’s leaning against the wall with his arms folded, watching me be a mom. “Why don’t you just go backpacking this summer and then go back to school in the fall like you’re supposed to?”

  “Because I’m not getting anything out of college. It’s stupid. My classes are boring and I don’t want to be here,” Nicky says. “I thought you’d be the one who’d get that. You get me. Dad doesn’t.”

  “Listen, sweetie, can we talk about this later? This isn’t such a great time.”

  “Where are you? You sound like you’re in the middle of a train station or something.”

  “Nope, I’m just outside on the street,” I tell him. “Listen. Why don’t I call you tonight?”

  “But, Mom, I’m supposed to sign up for classes now, and I really, really do not want to come back to this place. I’m just wasting Dad’s money here. Tell him that. He hates the idea of wasting money.”

  “Listen, just go sign up anyway. We’ll talk about this on spring break. You are coming for break, aren’t you?” Jeremiah detaches himself from the wall he’s leaning on and wanders a few feet away, giving me some space. He stands and looks at a poster hanging on a little street kiosk as if it’s the most fascinating thing in the world. It’s such a luxury, getting to observe him without him looking at me. If I squint, he looks exactly the same as he did years ago—same weight, same way of walking, same whatever it was that used to drive me so mad for him. I’m grateful for the distance, I realize in surprise. This moment to think and breathe. I feel grounded again.

  Nicky is whining about how his father is going to give him a hard time if he leaves school. He says Grant has never understood him, that I’m the only one who can help him.

  “Well, he is a professor,” I say. “He believes in education.”

  Jeremiah puts his hands in his pockets and rocks backward on his heels, not looking at me. He has a thoughtful, concerned look on his face as he watches a street person lurching down the street. I see him reach out and steady the man as he comes closer, see the way he reaches into his pocket and hands the man something.

  The word kryptonite rises in my head. Jeremiah is my kryptonite. I am breathing better now that I’m even a few feet away from him. My strength is returning.

  “Backpacking is an education!” Nicky says. “You gotta tell him that for me. You can make him see. You didn’t finish college, and you did all right.”

  I should have postponed this conversation, but I didn’t—because it hits me that I wanted this distance. I am actually prolonging this, hanging on to the phone as if for dear life. “First of all, honey,” I say, “you and I are different people, and second of all, the times are different. And I’ve always wished I went back. It was a mistake.”

  I am not going to sleep with Jeremiah. I know that now.

  “Get out of here,” Nicky is saying. “You’re like a major artist doing books! You got what you wanted without college!”

  “It’s not the way you think. I didn’t do exactly what I wanted. Let’s talk more about this later. This really is a terrible connection.”

  “All right,” he says. “But if you talk to Dad …”

  There’s a cluster of static and we get disconnected. But for some reason, I don’t take the phone away from my ear. I pretend that I’m still connected, and I walk over to Jeremiah in the sudden blankness of silence from the cell phone world, and I blow him a kiss and do one of those fluttery finger waves, point to the phone, make a sad face, blow another kiss, and mouth the words “I’ve got to go”—and then I walk away.

  It’s that easy to just … walk away. Who knew you could do that?

  The glow of holy light su
rrounds me as I go, nearly blinding me.

  [fourteen]

  1979

  The apartment Grant and I moved to, when we moved out of Jeremiah and Carly’s place, was small but acceptable. Its one drawback was that it was next to Linnea’s building, which was unfortunate because I knew I would think of Jeremiah every single time I went in or out. It was a small walk-up above a market, with a tiny galley kitchen and a bedroom that would have been part of the living room but for the one step up that marked its boundary.

  We settled in. Grant had a shorter commute, which made him happy. And he seemed to accept that I’d suddenly decided on the move. “It’s time; we’ve lived with them for two years,” I said, and that was the only explanation I gave. It was the same thing I said to Carly, who was a little more puzzled by what must have seemed a rash decision. Jeremiah stayed tight-lipped. I cried when I kissed the twins good-bye.

  Carly said, “Wait a minute. Whoa. You can’t disappear on us. You’ll come back for dinners and celebrations. We’ll still do holidays.”

  We did not go back for dinners and holidays. I made excuses each time. I ached to hold the children, to read Goodnight Moon again, for the smell of their hair and the way they snuggled up to me. But I didn’t go back.

  Jeremiah and I didn’t see each other for a while. A long time, actually, weeks. I went into a depression. Maybe not a clinical depression, but a depression just the same. I wanted to sleep all the time; I lost my appetite. I would look for him on the street. On days when I didn’t work, I would take the subway over to the old place, and then walk around the neighborhood, never quite allowing myself to approach his apartment building. Instead, I’d hang around at the end of the block and look down the street. Stupid, stupid. But all I wanted was to catch a glimpse of him—just to see him going into one of the markets, pushing the twins in their stroller, or loping down the street with his hands in his pockets. Grant was busy and distracted, and I yearned for Jeremiah, for the way he looked at me and saw me, for his long, tapered fingers tracing my features, for his face above mine in bed. Laughing. Reading me his secret book, which was so raw and beautiful, and which I loved because it came from some vulnerable place in him.