Jim was doing well. He was saving money, seeing the world. He had lost a little weight. He remembered Charlie’s birthday and sent a card on time as well as calling on the day. He created an online dating profile and went on a few dates. They weren’t spectacular or anything, but he didn’t make a fool of himself either. He hadn’t made a drunken phone call to Laura in ages. Jim felt A-OK about life. He could hardly believe it. It felt as though he was trying on happiness like it was a garment; to see if it fit, to see if it was worth holding on to.
As Jim paused to scan the stack of the day’s mail, his eyes fell upon handwriting that he recognized before he’d even glanced at the return address. Laura wrote with a tight, backward-sloped cursive and grandiose capital letters at the beginning of each line.
The envelope was a padded eight-by-twelve bubble mailer with a cluster of American flag stamps in the corner. Jim examined the front and back of this envelope. There was a scribbly little circle of pen on the backside, where Laura had likely tested it out to make sure it would write on this surface. The corners were soft, as though it had not been handled carefully. Jim set it on top of the rest of his mail, which contained a utilities bill and a passel of coupons for the Eagle supermarket.
Jim parked his car in the spot directly out front of his home and carried the mail and his empty Nalgene bottle inside to his kitchen table. He was exhausted from the long workday, but this letter from Laura had his heart leaping. When she sent legal documents, it was always either via email, or through her lawyer and directly from that office. He could not think of a time in the last eight years that he’d received personal mail from her. He tossed the rest of the mail aside, and used a butter knife to slip open the envelope from Laura, adrenaline sailing off the top of his head. He tried to prepare himself for both the best and the worst. He could not imagine what either one would entail.
Jim eagerly drew out the contents of the envelope and stared down at what was not a letter, but a drawing.
He fought an immediate hot swell of bile.
He hadn’t seen the other woman in over a decade, not once since Laura had found out about their relationship, but the face was instantly recognizable. The drawing was crude and hurried in places, but very skilled overall; the important details and angles of her face rendered perfectly, the left eyebrow arched higher than the right, deep, dark eyes, full lips, hard jawbone. The resemblance to its subject was as clear and obvious as if it had been a photograph. In the lower right corner of the drawing was the scribbled signature of the artist: C. A. McNamara.
A deep and punishing blush quickly warmed Jim’s whole head. Charlie Andrew, his son.
Was this a joke? Ten years since Jim had last seen this woman’s face. Never once in these ten years had he expected that he’d ever see it again. Jim thoughtlessly wound up and swatted the Nalgene bottle squarely from the table so that it flew into the cabinets across the room. It bounced to the floor then rolled very slowly toward the dishwasher, the sound of the bottle against the floor as loud as a train in Jim’s ears. The heat on Jim’s face traveled downward, settling in his chest, where it thumped with fresh humiliation.
This shame was momentarily interrupted by legitimate confusion. Laura had never seen this other woman’s face, had never even known her full name. She had put the pieces together in other ways; catching Jim in lies regarding his whereabouts, bar tabs, unfamiliar smells on him. When she confronted Jim, he told her, truthfully, that he didn’t even know the other woman’s last name. Laura had insisted several times that Jim must deliver her to the other woman’s house so that they could have it out there, all three of them at once, but she seemed to lose interest in this confrontation after a short while, and never followed through on these threats. In fact, it had occurred to Jim at the time, Laura was so quick to end the marriage that Jim honestly thought not only had she stopped caring who the other woman was, but was perhaps even grateful to the other woman for providing an excuse to end the marriage.
And, Jim reasoned now, if Laura didn’t know who the other woman was, there was no way Charlie could have somehow identified her, figured it out on his own, all these years later. No way. And yet, here was her face, this other woman, drawn in his son’s own hand.
This was an impossibly cruel scenario, and as Jim stared at the picture now, stupefied, he was further distressed to realize that didn’t even know who to blame. Had Laura decided to punish him further, to taunt him? But why, after all these years? And . . . how? How had Laura found this woman, and why had she involved Charlie? Why had Charlie been forced to stare at this face, to reproduce it with his own hand?
A knock at Jim’s door startled him.
Jesus Christ. He was shaking. He pounded the underside of both fists into the table and it vibrated hard beneath him. He felt the vibration in his toes. He wiped his forehead into the crease of his elbow.
The knock came again. And he could’ve easily ignored it, had it not come from the side door, which entered to the kitchen. Someone who knew him, knew where to enter, could see the light on inside, could probably even see his silhouette. Jesus Christ. Jim turned the picture facedown on his kitchen table and went to the door.
Carly, the kid from the next house over, and her little brother, the toddler whose name Jim could never remember, were at the door. Carly balanced her brother on her tiny hip. Both of them were golden-haired and gray-eyed. Carly was a nice kid. Her mother was nice too, but a discouraging sort; ill-fitting workout clothes, noisy fights on the phone with collections agencies. Their house always smelled vaguely sulfuric. Carly was wearing overalls now, and a purple turtleneck. The toddler was chewing on a pacifier but looking otherwise quite serious and grown-up.
“Hi, Mr. McNamara,” Carly said.
“What’s up?” Jim said irritably. Ordinarily he would have invited them in for lemonade or a snack, but the picture there on his table had him jumping out of his skin, and he didn’t want anyone in his house right now. He was afraid of what he was feeling, what he might say.
Carly set her brother down, placing him carefully on his little orange-socked feet, but he quickly bounced down to his bottom and took a seat, slapping his hands on Jim’s linoleum floor. Carly pulled a SpongeBob backpack from around her back to her front, and walked it in to Jim’s kitchen table to unzip it. She withdrew a Ziploc baggie that held something large, and she thumped it heavily onto his table.
“Banana bread,” she said.
The inside of the bag was sweating. The bread was still warm.
“Thanks,” Jim said. He felt like crying.
“Hey, you’ve got a cricket,” Carly said.
“What?”
“Didn’t you hear it, just there? A cricket this time of year . .. it must’ve lived in your house all winter long,” she said, curiously. “Usually they hibernate til May or June, but he must’ve stayed with you all winter, to be up and chirping like that. You haven’t heard him before?”
Jim considered this for a moment. “I don’t believe so.”
“Wait for it...” Carly said, putting her finger to her lips.
They were silent for a few seconds, and the chirp returned. It sounded like the thing was in the cupboard beneath his sink. Jim couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before, if in fact it had spent the whole winter there, as Carly suggested.
“I think it’s a snowy tree cricket,” she said. “These things can tell you the temperature, ya know.”
“How’s that?” Jim said.
“If you count the number of chirps in fourteen seconds,” Carly explained, “And add forty, you’ve got the number of degrees Fahrenheit. We learned that one in science.”
“Is that right?”
“See for yourself,” she said.
Jim looked down at his digital watch, and changed the mode to a stopwatch setting. “I’ll time it,” he said to Carly. “You count.”
They stood quietly, listening for the chirp of the snowy tree cricket, and when it returned, Jim started the watch. H
e waited fourteen seconds, then signaled Carly to stop counting.
“Twenty-eight,” she said.
Jim pointed toward his digital thermostat on the wall, and Carly bounded over to check out the temperature on the little display panel. “Sixty-eight degrees,” she read out loud.
Jim felt utterly, uncommonly relieved by this—relieved to learn that the snowy tree cricket could be trusted.
He thanked Carly, and told her to thank her mother for the banana bread too. She lugged her brother back up onto her hip, and they left.
Jim sat back down at the kitchen table. He rested both palms on top of the warm loaf firmly, as though feeling for a pulse, preparing to perform CPR on the thing.
He’d call one of them right now, he decided, either Laura or Charlie, get to the bottom of this picture business, hash it out. There was no use putting it off. He briefly weighed the pros and cons of both, and decided to try Charlie first. Before reaching for his phone, Jim listened once again for the snowy tree cricket, and he was so relieved, so appreciative, when the chirp finally returned after what felt like a very long silence.
Jim took a seat at his kitchen table and dialed Charlie’s cell phone. While the phone rang, he turned the picture over before him so that the empty backside faced upward. He coughed into his fist and his throat felt as though it had shrunk to half of its normal size.
The phone rang several times, then there was a click, and Laura’s voice at the other end. “Hello?”
“Laura?”
“Charlie’s in his room,” she explained. “He left his phone charging here in the kitchen. Normally I wouldn’t touch the thing, but I heard it ring, then saw that it was you ...”
Jim was analyzing her voice for the anger that he expected, but it sounded soft and eager, perhaps a bit uncertain of itself. Perhaps, if he didn’t know better, it almost sounded as though she was pleased to hear from him.
“Laura,” he said. “That picture you sent me.”
Laura didn’t respond.
Jim rested his forehead in his open palm. “How did . . .” he started in. “Why did you ... Why did Charlie ...” he grappled for the best entry point.
Laura said, “It’s a nice picture, isn’t it?”
Nice? Was there sarcasm here? If so, where was the victory in her voice? “Nice?” Jim said.
“Yeah, nice,” she repeated. “I knew he’d never send you any of his work on his own. He’s so stubborn about sharing his stuff. I thought you’d be impressed.”
Jim was speechless.
“Didn’t I tell you this in the letter?” Laura continued. “I thought I told you. He was in such a mood last week, saying he was going to burn all his sketchbooks, that it was all garbage, it’s always something with him . . . Anyway, I begged him not to trash all of that work. Begged him to let me keep those sketchbooks. He didn’t care one way or the other, and handed them over to me. I paged through them and was so impressed, you know? He really doesn’t know how good he is. I didn’t know how good he is. This particular drawing stuck out to me, I don’t know, I just like it. I wanted you to see it.” She paused. “Didn’t I tell you all this in the letter?”
“What letter?”
“The one I sent with the picture, Jim, obviously.”
“There was no letter.”
“Oh ...” Laura said, wearily. “Did I forget to put the letter in? I swear .. . Did I forget to send the letter? Here . .. hang on .. . let me see something ...”
Jim listened to her soft panting as she went up a flight of stairs, then the shuffling of papers.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Laura said. “Here it is. It was meant to go in with the picture, but I must’ve absent-mindedly shoved it back into my desk rather than the envelope. I don’t know where my head’s at, Jim. Really, I don’t.”
“Wait. . .” Jim said, still reeling, battling disbelief. “Wait. . . Laura, do you know the woman in the picture?”
“What? No,” she said, sounding a bit surprised by the question, indifferent to it. “I asked Charlie the same thing, and he said she was just a stranger. He’s got lots of pictures of people, you know, strangers. I just happened to like this one in particular, this face. It’s a good face.”
“I see,” said Jim, his brain flooding with both a cool wash of relief, and wonder at the possibility that this picture had come about purely by happenstance. He turned the picture back over in front of him and stared at the face again. Ran his finger over his son’s signature in the lower right-hand corner.
“But don’t you want to know what’s in it?” Laura said.
“What’s in what?”
“The letter,” Laura said, “that I meant to send you. I have it here in front of me now, you want me to read it to you?”
Laura’s letter opened with an apology for the time that had elapsed since her last call. She said that she was terribly lonely and worried about Charlie, whose behavior grew more cryptic and dark and unpredictable every day. She knew that she hadn’t done much to earn Jim’s sympathy, but she didn’t know were else to turn, who else might share her concern for Charlie. She said that she missed Jim. Her voice wavered here as she read these words. Jim hiccupped in a half sob, covering his mouth so that she wouldn’t know. He longed for her.
Laura started into the next sentence, but then she stopped abruptly.
“Laura?” Jim pressed his ear to the speaker. “Are you there?” he said. “Laura?”
Now Jim could hear a man’s voice in the background, and Laura hung up Charlie’s phone without saying good-bye.
Jim stared at his phone in his palm as the “Call Ended” screen flashed, then it went blank.
“Come back,” he whispered.
Jim waited a few minutes, then tried to call Laura, this time on her cell phone, not Charlie’s. It went straight to voicemail, as though it had been turned off. He waited a few more minutes, then called again, and this time he left a voicemail. He said he wanted to help. He offered to fly from Butte to Buffalo the very next day. He said that he’d like to hear the rest of the letter. He paused and said that he sure did miss her too.
He sat at the table and tried to replay their entire conversation in his head. He wished he had it recorded. He wanted to know every single word, relive those seconds, her voice. Did she want him in her life again? He didn’t dare get his hopes up. Her missing him didn’t mean anything more than that. You could miss someone and no longer want them. You could miss them even if the love was gone. What was in that letter?
Jim tried to distract himself while he waited to hear back from Laura. He did a load of laundry. He poached a chicken and ate it over spinach. He cut off a slice of the banana bread the neighbor girl had brought over, and ate it with margarine. He checked his phone, email, phone, email, nearly lost his mind when the phone rang and it was not Laura but the guy down the street who had borrowed his power hacksaw.
“Sorry,” he said to the guy after answering the phone testily.
“I’m waitin’ on a call. You can just drop it by whenever—I’ll be up until nine or ten.”
Half an hour later, Jim received an email from Laura: Sorry Jim—it was a mistake to drag you into this. Kevin prefers that we don’t speak anymore unless it involves Charlie and is absolutely necessary. Take care.
Jim read this email, then read it six more times, and once more, aloud, shouting every word.
He desperately wanted a whiskey. This craving was worse than any he’d had in years, and he felt it from his hair to his toenails. He wanted his hand around the neck of a full bottle, wanted to pour it down his throat until he was blind.
He closed his laptop, trembling with the effort of doing so gently. He went to his living room and opened a newspaper. He couldn’t focus on a single word. He shredded the newspaper into strips and threw these pieces to the ground. He stuffed a crumpled ball of it into his mouth then spat it out. He hollered into his hands. He got up and punched his fireplace, which left his knuckles raw.
Then,
almost instantaneously, he felt much better.
He calmly picked up the pieces of newspaper and put them in his trash can. He ate another slice of banana bread. The guy from down the street returned with his hacksaw and apologized profusely for a small chip in the blade that he believed he’d caused. Jim said he was pretty sure it had been like that before.
At the end of Jim’s contract in Butte, in June, it was announced that the plant was only doing so-so, and reductions would be made. So, Jim got sent back to New York, for a need-based job driving trucks out of the Dunkirk plant. He contacted Laura to notify her of his return, and received a very curt response, wishing him well with the move.
Jim rented out a place in the Southtowns and waited for assignments. He was seldom without work for more than a week or two at a time, and during these weeks, he kept himself occupied with online courses in management, and new recipes. He offered to take Charlie out to lunch when Charlie returned his calls, which was not often. When they did spend time together, Charlie kept his head buried in his phone, offering nothing. Jim always hoped to overlap with Laura during the pickup, or drop-off, but this did not occur.
He went to AA meetings whenever he was able. He wondered if Cole had returned to the Buffalo area, if they might cross paths at one of these meetings. With these years of hindsight, it had become clear to Jim that the night he’d met Cole was the night when some inexplicable shift had occurred in his life. Jim still often thought about that night, wishing to understand what had transpired, what had been said in those lost moments. Jim wondered how he’d changed from a man who couldn’t hold a five-minute conversation without three drinks in his system, a man who hated himself so much that he sabotaged his own marriage, to a man who could acknowledge all of the things he’d lost, face them head on, a man who could spend Christmas alone and stone-cold sober. How he’d managed to become a man who finally deserved the things he once had.
Another Place You've Never Been Page 13
