Another Place You've Never Been

by Rebecca Kauffman

  Greenie thought again of her voice that day when they fought, her pain. It had occurred to him in that moment that perhaps he was much more powerful than he realized. Greenie looked down now at the people on the earth below him, the scattered few Wonderland employees and beyond them, a handful of people making their way down the boardwalk, and beyond them, three or four people walking alone on the beach. It occurred to Greenie now that all these people were probably more powerful to someone than they realized. And all these people were probably powerless to someone too.

  That fire down on the beach was now raging. Licking at the air above it with red tongues. It looked inviting, alive. As far as he could tell, there was still just that one person tending it.

  Greenie remembered then that Tracy’s birthday was in October, although he couldn’t recall the exact date, and he wondered if she’d gotten those sideline tickets, like she always talked about doing for her birthday. He really, really hoped that she had. He felt the weight of Monkey, even, still, and silent across his thighs, and he waited patiently for the wheel to move on.

  CALLAHAN’S

  It was mid-November and Laura needed to clear her head after a day of ominous silence in her house. She hadn’t yet made up her mind about the pregnancy. Jim was still in Waco, Texas. Charlie was in his room and she knocked on the locked door to ask if he wanted her to pick up anything for dinner. When he didn’t answer his door, she texted his phone, and he responded, by text, that he had no appetite. Laura decided to go to the Southtowns, where she would be certain not to run into Kevin or any of his friends or coworkers.

  Things with Kevin had started to go downhill last winter. He became irritable with Laura, pointing out the places where she’d gained a bit of weight and poking fun at her Southtowns accent.

  He got impatient when she expressed concern over Charlie. Kevin claimed that his oldest son had gone through something like this when he was thirteen—that it was a phase and Laura didn’t need to fuss so much about it. The kid was fine, Kevin said. He offered Laura brief, lackluster shoulder rubs.

  Kevin’s perspective on this changed one snowy evening, when Laura and Kevin returned from dinner to find Simon, Kevin’s beloved hyacinth macaw, missing. Kevin was livid, and insistent that Charlie had done something horrible to the bird. He claimed he knew that Charlie had always hated Simon. Laura didn’t know what to think. She listened to Charlie’s story about the crazy woman who came in for help and ran away with Simon. Kevin didn’t buy a word of it, even after Charlie produced her wet clothing. Kevin got the meanest he’d ever been with Charlie, calling him a weirdo, a psychopath, a bad seed. Laura tried to make peace between the two, claiming she believed Charlie’s story and urging Kevin to relax and give the kid a break, but deep down, she too suspected that Charlie was lying.

  Laura had a history of being lied to, but there was one major difference between being lied to by Charlie versus Jim: she had always been able to tell when Jim was lying to her. She didn’t even need to see the bar tab or smell the liquor to know when he’d been somewhere he claimed he hadn’t. And then, years into their marriage, when he started seeing another woman, Laura sensed it immediately. She wasn’t all that surprised; she and Jim hadn’t slept together in six months. What did she expect, really?

  But the fact that Jim was incapable of lying made it all the more puzzling when he claimed (truthfully, as far as Laura could tell) that his relationship with the other woman hadn’t been sexual.

  “Then what was it?” Laura demanded.

  Jim looked as stricken as a child being punished for the first time, but he had the weariness of a very old man. “It was .. . she felt. . . safe, I guess. Something comforting about it.” His shame was palpable and stinking up the room like rot. He wouldn’t meet Laura’s eyes.

  “Safe?” Laura screamed with a mean laughter. “Comforting?”

  “I guess so,” Jim said.

  “In what way? Tell me more,” Laura said.

  Jim exhaled and looked out the kitchen window. “She doesn’t know me.” He poked a hole in the paper towel that he held. “Or, I guess, she doesn’t know enough to be disappointed in me.”

  Shrill laughter escaped from Laura once again, even as tears blistered over her lids. “So she’s just your ‘comforting’ friend who I’ve never met and who you lie about seeing?”

  “I wouldn’t even call her a friend.” Jim put his finger through the hole in the paper towel and spun it slowly, his eyes darting toward the cabinet beneath the sink, where Laura happened to know that he stashed liquor sometimes.

  Laura sat down at their kitchen table. She was inclined to believe Jim only because he’d proven himself incapable of lying, but this didn’t change her view that the marriage was over. The disintegration of their relationship over the past five years had been so gradual, the end so inevitable, that by now the pain was constant, dull and deeply tiresome, like terminal cancer. She could barely even muster up the energy for this fight, which ought to have been a good one.

  “Do you want me to leave you?” she finally said, quietly. “Do you want to leave me?”

  Jim didn’t come to join her at the table. He said, “I want to deserve you.” He was facing the other direction, out the window, speaking over his shoulder. Laura didn’t interject to reassure him that he deserved her.

  She mulled silently, bitterly, over his words, long after they’d been spoken. Too good for him, just like he always said? He doesn’t deserve me, and one day I’ll realize it too? Well, fine, she thought. If he’s so convinced of that that he’s willing to let it ruin him, he might as well spend the rest of his life believing it’s true.

  Jim wasn’t a bad man—Laura was still convinced of this—but was he a great man? Was he even a good man? Had he ever been? How could a good man be consumed with such black and crippling self-doubt? How could a good man refuse to believe that one good thing existed about him, how could a good man so persistently refuse to be loved? For too many years, Laura had puzzled over why she was unable to make Jim happy. She had wasted too much time trying to improve herself in attempts to recapture their early love. In her failure to do this, her failure to save Jim from the dark sadness that had overtaken him, Laura had become cold and resilient and smug. Could a good man bring out such an ugly side of her?

  It wasn’t the fact that Jim didn’t have a high school diploma, drank too much, and had crowded front teeth that overlapped one another. It wasn’t these or any of the other things Laura knew that Jim hated about himself. It wasn’t even this other woman, whatever their relationship had or hadn’t been, that caused Laura to accept defeat. It was the darkness that had saturated their life together and went deeper than the sum of all these things. Laura didn’t know where it began and she didn’t believe it could ever be extinguished.

  Laura asked Jim to start packing up his things and she said there was no big rush.

  Rain beat the windows of Callahan’s. Laura sat at the bar. She ordered a Sprite and a basket of onion rings from the bartender, and watched Wheel of Fortune on mute.

  A woman eased into the barstool next to Laura. The woman was very tall and broad-shouldered, a gambler-style cowboy hat shadowing her face. Laura was mildly annoyed that the woman had chosen the seat right next to hers, when there were several other empties, but she was intrigued by the woman’s size and her garb—she was dressed in thick flannels and denim and worn leather, like a lumberjack. She pulled off a pair of brown leather gloves and slapped them onto the bar before her.

  When the bartender made her way over, the woman ordered chicken tenders and a coffee.

  Laura said, “Good choice.” She squeezed a slice of lime into her Sprite.

  The woman said, “Never been here before, just took a guess.”

  Laura said, “My memory is that the fried stuff is good, you wanna stay away from the chowder. And the tacos, if they still do those. I used to come a lot, but only been here once or twice in the past ten years.”

  The woman removed
her hat and set it on the bar. She smoothed her long hair back from her face, which was aged, masculine, beautiful. “You leave the area?”

  “Sort of,” Laura said. “Still have a soft spot for this place, though. Spent a few good nights here.”

  “That why you came back tonight?”

  “Nah,” Laura said. “Just in the mood for onion rings, and I didn’t feel like putting on decent clothes to go downtown.”

  Laura was quiet for a while. She saw a woman at the far end of the bar and thought for a moment that it was her friend Sally, who she hadn’t spoken to since high school. They were friends on Facebook, and this is how Laura happened to know that Sally had a five-year-old girl named Chloe who had some condition—in all of her pictures she had tubes coming out of her nose. Sally’s husband posted inspirational sayings and links to research on Chloe’s condition. Sally wore her hair the same way she had in high school—big bangs, badly contrasting highlights. This woman at the bar, Laura quickly realized, was not Sally but easily could have been, or any of the other women whose friendship had been lost in the years. Laura wondered what these women must think of her; if Sally wondered why, with that house and all the fancy vacations, Laura had not contributed to the online fund for Chloe’s care.

  Laura’s onion rings arrived, with a little cup of ketchup. She picked one up and it was too hot, so she put it back and licked her fingers.

  She thought of the first night she and Jim kissed, all those years ago, at this very bar. They were just a couple of kids! So healthy, so hopeful. It was snowing—around Christmastime. She remembered the heat that raced through her young blood that night. It was flurrying dreamily outside, and colorful big-bulbed lights were strung up along these ceiling beams. There was a massive fake spruce in the corner, covered in cheap metallic balls, tinsel, empty Jell-O shot containers and cocktail napkins with crude drawings. Christmas music bellowed, and bar guests shouted along, out of tune and behind the beat, arms around shoulders, bleary eyes and big smiles, looking to meet someone new or impress someone old. The bartender was a heavyset girl in a spandex elf suit. Sally danced lewdly with a life-size cardboard Santa, and men roared. Laura had been too quickly outpaced by her friends that night, and found herself unpleasantly sober. Jim seemed to be in the same boat.

  “Having fun?” she had said.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Me too,” she said, and they both stared out into the bar full of people having fun.

  Later that night, when Jim kissed her, he held her head like it was a tiny and expensive thing, and she felt music zoom through her.

  Now, Laura turned to the woman next to her. “You might be right.”

  The woman had her chicken and she finished chewing before asking, “’Scuse me?”

  Laura said, “Right that something in me wanted to come back to a place that was good to me once. You ever done that?”

  The woman tore apart a piece of chicken, which released a puff of steam. “Sure,” she said, as though she hadn’t necessarily been impressed with the results.

  “What’d you find there?” Laura said.

  “I found it was impossible to locate the same exact place.”

  Laura used her straw to poke at the lime in her Sprite and she took a sip. “How so?”

  “The way the world works...” the woman explained, “the way it moves as a planet, always shiftin’ and rumblin’ deep inside . . . turns out no place is ever quite the same as it was before. Landmarks and coordinates will’ve changed.”

  “Oh, you’re getting all scientific about it.”

  “Well . . .” The woman blew on a piece of chicken to cool it. “I just found that things are always shifting a few millimeters this way or that way, sittin’ a little bit different on this earth every time you return to them.” She popped the chicken into her mouth.

  Laura thought of the last night she had spent here, also with Jim, just two months earlier; the night she became pregnant. Jim had moved back to the area a while ago, but they had not spoken. Desperate and alone, Laura had finally caved and called him. The tension between Charlie and Kevin had put her over the edge and she was on three different anxiety medications. She had also discovered that Kevin was having an affair, but this was the least of her concerns. She told Jim everything about Charlie; the disappearance of the bird, the weird stuff on his Internet browsing history, the worrisome things he’d said to classmates, the school’s recommendation that he receive professional help. She had essentially stopped sleeping and resorted to distractions, losing herself to the Internet for many hours every night, researching mental health and celebrity gossip and weight loss products until dawn.

  Jim let her talk and talk that night, and when he finally spoke, his voice at the other end of the line was gentle and eager. He sounded like an old, dear friend.

  They had arranged to meet here at Callahan’s. Laura hadn’t set foot in the place since their split. Laura ordered fish and chips and Labatt Blues. Jim had a Reuben sandwich and coffee. He said he was almost two years sober. He was living a few blocks away, in the second story of a townhouse he shared with two graduate students at Buff State. They finished their meal and went to his home. He didn’t even have air conditioning, just a fan in every window. He peered into his refrigerator and offered her an O’Doul’s. He apologized that he didn’t have anything better.

  When she touched him, he wept.

  Laura hadn’t used protection for years; Kevin had had a vasectomy before they met. And she was in her thirties, for heaven’s sake, these things only happened to kids, didn’t they?

  She hadn’t thought much of her first missed period, as her cycle always got weird when her weight fluctuated. But after the second missed period and the onset of nausea, she went to the doctor and it was confirmed. She was already six weeks along. She called Jim, who was in Waco at the time, on a month-long assignment, and he offered to come home right away. She said that wouldn’t be necessary—that she wanted to research her options first. She didn’t tell another soul. She researched her options.

  The woman had finished her meal and was paying in cash.

  Laura used her fork to peel back the breading of her onion ring, exposing a shrimpy little something that was not really a slice of onion but merely the limp shred of its skin. “These are not actually very good,” she said, mostly to herself.

  TALL TALES

  It was the twenty-fourth of December. Tracy had just dropped off a few bags at the Salvation Army then stopped in at Wegman’s to pick up a jug of eggnog and a log of premade snickerdoodle dough. She’d wrap gifts tonight, and drive up to Shelly’s house tomorrow morning.

  On her way home, Tracy got off Route 5 to cruise down Baynard Street. She had been passing the Greens’ house every time she was out and about for several weeks now, curious to know if Greenie would be home for the holidays. It would be very unlike him not to spend Christmas at his mother’s, even if things were busy at his cousin’s restaurant in New Jersey. But she hadn’t seen any sign of Greenie. Not his Honda, nor any unfamiliar vehicle with Jersey plates parked out front of his parents’ home, and nothing but darkness in his second-floor bedroom. Not that she would pay him a visit or give him a call or anything if his car did show up; she’d just want to know, was all.

  It was 5:00 p.m. and after a day of steady snowfall, the streets were packed hard and slick.

  Upon reaching the Greens’ home, Tracy was startled to see Greenie’s parents out front of the house, stringing lights up just below the gutter. The front of their little yellow house was dusted with snow. The big wreath on their front door was crooked; the velvety red bow hung loose. Tracy slowed her truck inconspicuously to a complete stop. Their house sat out near the road, and Tracy’s truck wasn’t more than twenty, thirty feet now from Greenie’s parents. She kept her truck in gear.

  Tracy had only caught a few faraway glimpses of Greenie’s father over the years, and never his mother in person. His father was at the top of a stepladder with a
drooping fistful of big-bulbed multicolored Christmas lights in one hand and a cable stapler in the other. Greenie’s mother was at the base of the ladder, feeding him lengths of the lights. Tracy thought it very curious to be putting up lights on Christmas Eve.

  Greenie’s mother was overweight. Tracy had only seen her in photographs where she was wearing makeup and had her hair done up big and nice. Here now she looked so plump and plain and slow-moving in her knee-high snow boots over sweatpants, a puffy teal coat, and red knit cap. As Greenie’s mother passed the lights upward to her husband, she took a moment with every single bulb, to double check that it was screwed tightly into its socket. Tracy stared at Mrs. Green’s round pink face. She was very focused on the task at hand. She wore a little smile that twitched and flickered like a drowning flame.

  A familiar feeling crawled from Tracy’s stomach up to her throat and it rested there, thick and wet. She thought of all the times Greenie had backed out of important things or simply not shown up. How she’d felt each time, receiving the news that he wasn’t coming to such and such after all, or she was disinvited from such and such; that fierce and helpless reality that she couldn’t make him want her as much as she wanted him.

  Then, without meaning to, Tracy thought back further, much further, to the first times she’d had this same feeling, when she was a kid; long before she knew Greenie. Back when she’d waited on phone calls from her dad, begged him for fishing trips, all the times he hadn’t followed through. Sure, he phoned sometimes, and took her out fishing when he was around, but not near as much as she’d have liked. She could never count on him the way you want to count on a person. She thought about that forty-pound tiger muskie her dad was always talking about. How, supposedly, the thing lived in some taxidermy office up in Wawa, Ontario, but for as proud as he’d been, he didn’t have any photographs, and hadn’t ever had the wherewithal to retrieve the thing, in all those years. She was pretty sure it had been a tall tale all along. All these men, with all their tall tales.