The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  And two months after he flew back home, he died of a drug overdose. Grant was resolute in claiming it was accidental, that it had to be, but I was sure it was suicide, and could not be comforted. I had seen the shadow fall across him.

  That was the beginning of things starting to fall away. I should have seen it coming: first there was David, but then, one by one, our parents, the cocker spaniel, and the barn, which burned down in a fire. Our best friends moved away and didn’t write or call, another dear friend got sick with cancer and became famous, briefly, by writing about it, and then died … and finally the children moved out.

  And now perhaps our marriage is another casualty.

  I have lost so much, and I will lose this, too.

  Oh, I am so tired. I want to lie down on Sophie’s couch and stare out the window at the sky, at the birds that occasionally fly past in groups—and what do they call that, a group of birds? I’ve lost that word, too. A school of birds? A gaggle? A flock. Yes, that’s it. A flock. A flock of birds.

  I want to try not to think anymore. If only I could just not think for a little while, things would be so good.

  [nineteen]

  2005

  After Sophie said the sacred, unsayable word Jeremiah, after Grant’s eyes had gone opaque and after he had said in his cold, final voice, with all of us staring at him, “Well, that is that, then, isn’t it? That’s the end of anything else that needs to be said,” and had gone off to pack his stuff, Nicky comes and wraps his arms around me, his wild-man arms, and whispers, “Don’t let the turkeys get you down.”

  “What?” I say.

  He laughs. He’d heard that one of the presidents had written that note to his successor and left it in his desk in the White House—and he’d always wanted to say it, too. “It sounded good,” he says. “I don’t know what this is about, but one thing I do know is that you’ve got it going on where the wife stuff is concerned. Ten to one Dad’s being an asshole.”

  “No,” I say and disentangle myself from him. “That’s not the way this is.”

  I go into the living room and say to my husband’s back, “Grant, please. It’s not what you think.”

  “And just how is that?” he says.

  “Listen, I ran into him—Sophie and I ran into him one day while we were at a market buying stuff for dinner. We had just come from a doctor’s appointment, so we were in a different neighborhood, and there he was. Buying ice cream.”

  He does not turn, just keeps folding things and putting them into his suitcase, his shoulders moving methodically, unemotionally, back and forth.

  “Grant, I can’t stand it if you don’t listen to me about this.” I can’t see his face, so I go around to the other side of the couch. “The statute of limitations is up on this,” I tell him. “You have nothing to fear from him.”

  He stops for a moment and looks right at me. His eyes are hard. “Well, now, Annabelle, that just isn’t precisely true, is it?”

  “Come on, this is ridiculous! Okay, fair enough. I saw Jeremiah Saxon. Twenty-six years have passed, and big deal! I run into him in a market, against all odds. And then, yes, I go for coffee with him. I sit in Starbucks with the man and hear about his boring, trite, dull life.”

  “And then apparently you went for more renditions of his boring, trite, dull life.”

  “One more time, Grant. I went one more time, but that isn’t the point. That isn’t what matters here. The point is—the point is—that after all this freaking time, you should know what I’m like. You should be giving me the benefit of the doubt. Even if I had seen him ten more times, a hundred more times, even if I’d invited him to come to New Hampshire to visit us, you should know me by now. That is the point.”

  He zips closed his suitcase and stands it upright. “Annabelle, there are so many things operating in my head right now that I cannot possibly sort them all out. But first and foremost is that you have lied to me before about this man, and you are not above lying again. Interesting that it was Sophie and not you who told me about your seeing Jeremiah—”

  “And why do you think that was, Grant? Why in the world would I ever tell you something like that, knowing this was the kind of response it would get?”

  “—and interesting that you didn’t see fit to mention it, not even when we were alone last night and you were exclaiming how much you love New York City and telling me how you basically never go anywhere except to go to the market or to sit in the park. You don’t bring up the one man, the one man, Annabelle, that we have an agreement about.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that we shouldn’t have ever made such an agreement as that in the first place? That that so-called agreement is what is at the root of all our problems?”

  “The root of all our problems,” he says quietly, “is that you are in love with someone outside our marriage. And you haven’t gotten over him.”

  “That is not true, Grant.”

  “Nicky!” he calls. “Get your stuff and take it to the car. Sophie, come give your old dad a kiss. We’re heading out.”

  There’s a flurry of activity then, the kids showing up and doing what he says. We all go through the motions of good-bye, just as though everything might be normal. His perfunctory kiss glides right off my cheek. And then, like that, he is gone.

  ONCE THEY have left, Sophie goes into her room and closes the door against me. I take the sheets off the sofa bed and fold everything up. I stare out the window at the street for a long time, and then do some therapeutic dish-washing. Later, I make spaghetti for dinner. My mother used to say that red food is good when you are desolate.

  I miss my mother. I wonder what she would say to me now, what possible good spin she would put on this. I try to summon her and the way she would always say something comforting about whatever love trouble I’d gotten myself into, but now that she’s been dead for so long, she does not come.

  When the fragrance of spaghetti sauce has filled up the house with comfort and warmth, I knock on Sophie’s door and ask her if she wants to eat by herself or if she’d like some company.

  She takes a long time before she says, “I guess I don’t want to be by myself.”

  I bring in our food on trays, and we sit on the bed and eat, watching a rerun of Friends.

  “This laugh track is giving me a headache. I hate phony laughter,” she says and turns off the set, and then we push the food around on our plates in silence, not looking at each other.

  “So you cheated on Dad with Jeremiah, is that it?” she finally says.

  “It’s more complicated than that, Sophie.” I sigh. “This is stuff that happened between us a long time ago—long before you were even born.”

  “You know what gets me the worst? All this time, all these conversations we’ve been having about marriage and about being faithful, and I kept asking you about what you would do if Dad ever cheated, and you were just so blasé. And then all along it was you! You were the one cheating. I can’t believe it. I mean, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that my mother was out with somebody else, and my dad was the one trying to—trying to—”

  “Sophie—”

  “How could you? That’s what I want to know. How could you do it?” She is crying now. “You have the sweetest, most faithful guy in the whole world. Remember when we were talking the other day and I said that about him? And you stood there agreeing with me and yet the whole time you had to be thinking that you were the one who had cheated! How does a person—”

  “Sophie. Stop it. Listen to me.”

  “What?” she says. “Say it. Give me your excuses.”

  “Baby, there aren’t any excuses. Every marriage has its problems. Everybody goes through different things and we all make horrendous mistakes at times. We hurt each other, we do things we regret, and we come to our senses if we’re lucky—”

  “Mom! Did you see his face? He was devastated. You didn’t come to your senses, Mom! Dad thinks you’re still cheating on him! And I don’t blame him! You are
, aren’t you? You went out with Jeremiah again and again! I don’t believe it. I can’t believe this.” She is rocking back and forth, her voice getting more and more shrill. “I can’t even trust you anymore! How can I believe anything you say?”

  “Sophie, stop this,” I say. “You have to stop. If you want to have a sane, rational discussion about marriage and about my life, then I have to insist that you tone it down. I am not going to have you speak to me like this. We are talking about something that happened twenty-six years ago.”

  She stops talking and puts her hands over her face, a pitiable, forlorn child who will not look at me.

  I get up and go to the bathroom, splash water on my face, and stare at myself in the mirror. When I go back into her bedroom, I sit down softly on her bed and reach over and touch her foot.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She nods and blows her nose.

  “First, let me just tell you that this happened long before I ever really felt married, if that makes any sense to you. And it was wrong—I’m not denying that it was wrong—but it just happened. I fell in love with two men. That’s what happened. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t trying to hurt your father. But, you know, Sophie, what I have learned is that sometimes love happens to you when you don’t expect it. Love just comes for you. It was like—it was like some primitive force …”

  She looks at me, and then her face crumples. “This can’t be happening! I don’t want to hear about this primitive force of yours. I can’t listen to this!”

  I stand up. “It’s okay. You don’t have to hear about it.” I start putting on my shoes.

  She’s still crying. “You and Daddy had the per—the perfect marriage, and he’s been wonderful to you, and now nothing is what it seems like, and how am I supposed to feel? You want me to feel sorry for you because you fell in love with two men? Look at what you’ve done to all of us!”

  I turn and leave the room, and then, because that’s not far enough away from her, I leave the apartment and go down the elevator and out onto the dark street.

  ONCE I get outside, I can’t think of anything else to do, so I call Magda on my cell phone. My hands are shaking. It’s chillier outside than I had reckoned, and I forgot to put on my jacket. I have so much to tell her. The last time I talked to her I told her about what had seemed like the astonishing coincidence of running into Jeremiah. During that call, I was still giddily deciding whether to go for coffee with him or not.

  She’d been very funny about the whole thing. “I think before I can hear any more about Jeremiah, I need you to tell me that you’re not in some train station reenacting your runaway plan with him,” she’d said. “Because I would need to lose a few pounds and grow my hair longer before I could even consider coming to collect Grant. He wouldn’t even look at me the way I look today.”

  It’s always been our joke—ever since she masterminded my getting back with him—that if I blew it again, she would no longer help me but would take him for herself. Even at the most difficult times of my marriage—times that I now know were just mud puddles compared to the ocean of trouble I find myself in—even when I was complaining loud and long about some slight of his, coming home too late, being thoughtless about Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day, she was resolutely in his corner.

  So I walk blocks and blocks and tell her about my two visits with Jeremiah, which would have been worth a whole phone call just on their own but I didn’t have time—and then I have to tell her that Grant found out and is furious with me, and that Sophie is now up in her bed with her fingers in her ears saying, “LALALALA” when I try to talk.

  There’s just the long-distance cell phone hum when I get finished.

  “Hello?” I say. “Did we get disconnected? Can you hear me now?”

  “I’m actually speechless, Annabelle,” Magda says. “I don’t know what the hell you should do. Walking the streets sounds like the sanest idea of all.” And she laughs. “Jesus. You know what I actually think? I think this is one of the best reasons I can think of never to have children—so they don’t find out that you’re just a regular human being and then hate you for it.”

  “Now that you mention it, that is a good reason,” I say. “I remember hating my mother for everything she did. I hated her finding feminism and leaving my father, then being with that jerk she was with, and then going back to my father. I was the most unforgiving about that. I saw that as her forsaking her feminist ideals, when I’d hated that she ever had any in the first place.”

  “Yeah. God. Mothers and daughters,” Magda says. “Hard ride. But, geez, it seems particularly unfair that you’re being hated for something you did before Sophie was even born. Doesn’t the statute of limitations ever expire on something like this?”

  “Well, that’s what I want to know,” I say.

  “And I was just sitting here feeling sorry for myself because I forgot to get married and have kids.”

  “Yeah, well, if you ask me, you lived your life perfectly.”

  “Who knew?”

  “If I could turn back time—isn’t there a song that says that?”

  “So what are you going to do, besides walking the streets of New York until your cell phone battery gives out?” she wants to know.

  “I can’t actually imagine.”

  “Well,” she says, “if I could just make one suggestion, baby?”

  “Please. I insist. Give me anything you got. I got nothing here.”

  “Well, I think you should stand strong and firm. Remember that you have nothing to be ashamed of. You’re a wonderful, open, loving person, and you’ve given your life to raising these kids and being Grant’s wife. Your long-ago affair with Jeremiah was the result of factors that have nothing to do with who you are now. You’ve done it all splendidly, Annabelle—much better than any of the role models you had growing up, that’s for sure. And whatever happens—well, you have that.”

  “Thank you,” I say when I can speak again. “But you’re being way too generous. I have hurt so many people. I’ve ended up hurting everybody that I really love.”

  “Oh, tell them all to grow a pair,” she says. “You and I both know the truth.” Then she says, “Not that it matters, Annabelle, but … is Jeremiah still hot?”

  I try to answer her, to say yes, yes he is, but all that comes out is a tiny noise from my throat.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say after a moment. “But I can’t—I think I have to go.”

  “Oh, baby,” she says. “Oh, baby. This is so hard. But, you know, it’s okay to always be a little bit in love with Jeremiah, isn’t it? You can have that for yourself. It doesn’t mean you’re going to change anything.”

  I AM waiting for something—good sense to set in, most likely—and finally April comes, and the apartment becomes too small and too stuffy to bear. Spring is in full swing now, but the building management doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. The heat blasts through the radiators the same as ever. I have hot flashes and wake in the night feeling baked, and I seem to be moving through life harboring a headache that won’t shake itself loose. I am going through the motions: cooking food for Sophie, cleaning up afterward, eating, trying to sleep, watching television, drawing pictures, and waiting. I try to be available to her, but we decide that it’s best if I start sleeping on the living room couch now that she is so large and I am so restless in the night, needing to kick off the covers and then pull them back on at least a dozen times. Even during the day I try to give her space by staying in the living room reading or painting. My editor has called and told me about a series of picture books involving children traveling around the world, and she’d like to see some sketches.

  Sophie and I seem to be tiptoeing around each other. I hear her sometimes talking to Grant on the phone, giving her daily health update. My legs are aching, and yesterday I had a headache, but the baby isn’t kicking me so much today. This is way more information than she gives to me.

>   On Friday, we go for the weekly ultrasound, and when it’s over, Dr. Levine turns off the machine and turns on the overhead light, and then she says the time has come to put the C-section on the schedule. Sophie is at about thirty-four weeks now, and it should be done in her thirty-seventh week. How about Monday, April 25?

  So Beanie Bartholomew will be a little Taurus, just like her mom. Stubborn and opinionated and earthbound, but also good and real and true.

  When the nurse writes the date down on the calendar, I look over at Sophie, who lies there on the ultrasound table, twisting a Kleenex in her hand.

  “Is this really the only way to get the baby out?” she asks in a surprisingly young, little-girl voice. “I always thought there was a chance I could do this, you know, normally.”

  Dr. Levine, who is my favorite of the obstetricians we see, smiles at her. “Well, the placenta has definitely stayed put over the cervix, so this becomes the normal way this time,” she says. “And, Sophie, I know your mother would agree with me here—it’s not going to serve you to think of this as abnormal. What’s great about this is that we can deliver you a nice, normal baby, and that’s better than a normal pregnancy or what you would call a normal delivery. I go for a normal baby every time.”

  “Do you think everything is really, really going to be all right?” Sophie says, and her lower lip trembles.

  Dr. Levine pats her on the shoulder and says, “I think it’s going to be just fine. You’ve done beautifully, Sophie, and you’re almost at the end. You should be very proud,” but then she sends me a quizzical look. At her signal, I follow her into the hallway while Sophie is getting dressed.

  “How are things going at home?” she says. “Anything I should know?”

  “No,” I say. “Not really.” Do I really have to explain to the obstetrician that I had an affair before Sophie was born?

  Dr. Levine smiles at me. “Well,” she says, and pats my arm. “She’s just an emotional person, isn’t she? I’m guessing it can’t be easy for you living with her during this time. It would be great if this husband of hers could get home for the birth, wouldn’t it?”