You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “She doesn’t work here anymore,” the receptionist said.

  “She left?”

  “I’m sorry, who’s calling, please?”

  I almost hung up. “This is Dr. Aaron,” I said. “I’m off campus.”

  “Dr. Aaron, I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize your voice. No, Regina finished last week, last Monday. I can give you her e-mail address if you want. Did she work for you at some point?”

  And then that afternoon, as if responding to my signal:

  From: belletter@umich.edu

  To: vaaron1118@yahoo.com

  Subject:

  Victor,

  I go into this e-mail without knowing why I write, or necessarily what I want to write, but hoping that by writing, by satisfying the compulsion, whatever I mean to express will come out clearly. The need will be sated. Need to explain, need to bear witness for those who can’t speak for themselves. A humanitarian impulse.

  Please excuse the purple prose. I’m trying to live up to the occasion and be a lady.

  A lady, they say, knows when to leave.

  I believe you, Victor Aaron, to be among the strangest men I’ve ever met. Not only as recent reports demonstrate, but earlier, a priori, when I first sought you out for a lover because you were tall and intelligent and from New York, and you possessed that older-guy thing. All that lured me to bring you under harness. The challenge of it. The hunt.

  But where other men would buck a woman’s sway or submit to it, it’s like you didn’t recognize what was happening. You operated by other laws, ones tied beyond this world. I figured this out last night. Your wife had died and everyone knew but you.

  I hope you don’t find that cruel. And I hope you’re doing better. I hope the new windshield didn’t cost too much and that you leave your island.

  Please don’t reply to this e-mail or contact me again. But wish me luck as I embark on yet more debt and more studies. I still don’t know what I’ll do when I grow up, but I want more than ever to do something. Something worth doing, and not just for show. La Loulou is retiring; maybe just Regina will be good enough for what comes next. My brother will be nearby and at the very least he’s interesting company. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.*

  Yours sincerely,

  Regina

  *You won’t get this reference, but don’t stress out. Some things you shouldn’t change.

  The tourist season ended after Labor Day. Numbers on the ferry dwindled and the temperature dropped. We saw fewer visitors to scout the pie stands, and there weren’t as many drowsy summer people to nod to when I walked the lane into town.

  I’d started collecting rocks off Betsy’s beach. They were like the ones at Hunter’s, coral with black spots, or gray and ringed with pink stripes. There would be some specific cause, I thought, for why those markings developed, and though I’d never been curious about geology before, it became a preoccupation. Most days, I found myself spending an hour or two with my pant cuffs rolled up, wading through the tide and storing my most interesting specimens in a bucket. I made a mental note to seek out someone in the geology department when I returned to the university. As sediment, were these rocks unique to Mount Desert Island? Why pink and gray, these tiger stones, and from what material causes? Had they turned up at Cape Hatteras, on Miami beaches, or was it only in Maine that they’d settled? What had brought them there?

  By day I was finishing Sara’s entry in the Gardner book, as much of her life as I could remember. The end was in sight, but what had begun as a paragraph was approaching twenty pages. At dusk I’d check in with the lab, and some nights I joined Ken and Dorothy for dinner to watch police procedurals on TV until I was tired. Some nights I was. Others I stayed up until three a.m. and still couldn’t sleep without a couple of drinks.

  I called the lab on Wednesday. I knew Lucy had recently returned from the Virgin Islands.

  “Nice vacation?”

  “You know, not bad. First day, I’m unpacking, I pull out a drawer to put away my tops, and this iguana jumps out, we’re talking twelve inches nose to tail, and lands on my chest. Gripping my jog bra with its claws. Other than that, I think this may have been the first time I actually relaxed. On the second-to-last day, but still.”

  “So you went with some girlfriends.”

  A short pause. “I said yes, Victor.”

  I laughed and had to hold the phone away for a moment. “Of course you did,” I said. “How wonderful. Congratulations. I’m very happy for you.”

  Now Lucy laughed, too. “Thank you. I don’t think my mother’s accepted it yet.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “I am. I’m trusting.”

  “So what does the engagement ring look like?”

  “Oh, it’s a Specialized.”

  “A what?”

  “A Rockhopper. Deke thought it was time I tried mountain biking, something we can do together. Isn’t that cute?”

  “Probably a lot of biking near San Francisco,” I said. “Lot of labs out there, too.”

  She exhaled lightly. “I’ve heard that,” she said.

  It was nine o’clock, a Thursday evening, when Joel showed up, banging on the door. “I’ve been drinking,” he shouted from the yard.

  “Seriously, I’m fucking tearing my skull apart out there, thinking about this shit,” Joel said, pacing in the kitchen. His bulk was full of energy, the opposite of drunk. “You know, the only time of day my mother was good for, my father was good for, was happy hour?”

  “Joel, come on.”

  “Hey, it’s in the blood, man, this is programming speaking. You’re the gene guy, am I wrong?”

  “Yes and no,” I said. He stared at me, his eyes like knuckles. “A lot of it, introns, we’re clueless about. Ninety-five percent, some say.”

  “What did you do, tell me that.”

  “What did I do when?”

  “After Sara. Your ‘coping mechanisms.’ The scientist’s guide to grief, or whatever.”

  “I did nothing.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Not at all.”

  “So then you end up on a sailboat.”

  “Something I regret,” I said, “on top of everything else.”

  He waited a second, but didn’t stop staring. “So you figured I’d be drinking.”

  A statement, not a question. I said, “Can I get you some water?”

  Joel was rattling his head. He couldn’t seem to stop grinding his teeth. He laughed under his breath, then went outside, plopped down in one of the chairs in the yard, and lit a cigarette. I sat down next to him and for some reason this propelled him up a second later, dragging the chair. He lifted it and slammed it against a tree, over and over, warping the frame, until he flung the poor thing ten feet out into the ocean.

  We watched it bob in the water. There wasn’t any current to pull it away.

  “You want to know what I’ve been doing, right?” He turned, flicking his cigarette butt in the water. “Fine, I took two tabs of Ecstasy. Happy now? This afternoon, off one of my cooks. How about that? Unbelievable rush. Nearly burned my head off. Then, an hour later, my sous-chef kicks me out. Of my own kitchen. At least I think he did. I mean, I was blissing out like I’ve never seen. But you know what? I drove over to Jill’s. Like, why not? Genius. See I had this incredible epiphany. I wanted to share how I’d become, like, one with the universe and shit. But by the time I get there, it’s gone. It’s transformed. And I’m going schizo. Like I was chopped in two, me the watcher and then me, you know, independent of that. Like my thoughts were disappearing down a black hole and I couldn’t catch them. I saw myself disappearing. Like, whatever I was, I wasn’t anymore, or what I was was being sucked out somewhere else, and I was left watching it get sucked away. Or whatever. So that was what I wanted to tell Jill about. I ring the bell. Next thing you know, Jill’s there and I’m telling her how I’ve gone crazy, I’m crying, and then she puts her hands up, so I’m quiet and she tells me, that’s it. I
could save it. She didn’t care. This was the end, she’d call the police if need be, but I couldn’t come back, ever. Then she slammed the door in my face. I mean, now that I can fucking understand. So I mean, that’s exactly what I’m thinking now, you know? Just stop. Just stop. A nice, simple exit. Slam the door on this shit. I mean, look at me. What am I adding to the world right now? Fucking what, man?”

  He was pacing around the yard in the dark. He saw my bucket of rocks, picked it up, started taking out the rocks and one by one throwing them far out into the water.

  I took the bucket away and got Joel inside and gave him one of Betsy’s sleeping pills. He lay down in the cot and passed out with his boots on. I called Ken and asked him if he knew any support services. Turned out Cranberry had a weekly AA meeting falling on the following afternoon, held in his church of all places.

  We went down together the next morning. I introduced Joel to Ken in the church driveway. Ken said he’d always been a fan of Joel’s way with scallops.

  I looked at Joel. He nodded. “It’s going to be okay,” Ken said.

  Ken called that afternoon, around the time the meeting would be getting out. “We were sorry we didn’t see your buddy this afternoon.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He said he was going to join you for lunch, then the two of you would be coming back together. Not true?”

  I slammed down the phone. I called Joel’s cell and left a message. I called Blue Sea. I called Jill. There was a knock on the door and through the screen I saw Ken.

  “I’m sorry, Victor. I shouldn’t have let him out of my sight.”

  “He’s an adult. I’m sure it’s fine.”

  Just stop. Just stop. A nice, simple exit.

  “Can I help?”

  We jumped in his golf cart.

  “Just get me to the ferry.”

  From Northeast Harbor, I didn’t know where to start. The island was full of bars and restaurants and gas stations selling beer. I drove home to change clothes and think. Weeks since I’d left, it was an odd sensation, driving down the road to my house. The woods looked oddly unrelated to any life I’d lived there before.

  My answering machine had a single message.

  “Victor, this is Joel. Look, I gotta run. You’re not going to see me anymore. I need to start over someplace. San Diego, Austin, just someplace warm. I know you’re the worrying type, so I thought I’d call, seriously you’ve done a lot for me. But anyway, it’s cool, I’ve done it before. I just can’t hang around here anymore, this island’s full of ghosts. I don’t know how you do it, but I can’t.”

  Caller ID said the call originated from Cape Near.

  Betsy’s car was in the driveway when I pulled in. The front door to the house had the screen door propped open by an old gardening bench. I found Joel out back, sitting in the lawn chair Betsy always favored, facing the woods. An army duffel lay fully stuffed in the grass.

  “I’m bullshit,” he said after a second.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He laughed. “I’ll tell you, you know the one story I like? About school? It was my thirteenth birthday. My parents neglected to visit, they didn’t call. No surprise, they’d shipped me away since I was seven. For presents I think I got some new shirts and a ten-dollar bill. But I remember the card my mother sent. I still have it, it’s in the safe-deposit box. On the front there’s this photograph of a little boy laughing, with his hands tucked down his pants. And on the inside she wrote, I can quote it, ‘By this point you’ve probably learned how to entertain yourself. Pleasure’s rare enough, you should grab it when you can. Love, Mom.’ Fucking, I was flabbergasted. It took me a second to figure it out. Not like the other guys were getting advice from their mothers, you know, pro-whacking off.

  “I figured out later on, though,” he said, “when I wasn’t such a prick, that that card was a lot more who my mother was than some Oxford shirts.”

  “Joel, you don’t have to go through this alone.”

  “People say that.”

  “Why don’t you come back to Cranberry? Regroup, get a fresh start.”

  He turned and gazed at me. He looked exhausted, but also calmer than anytime recently. “Tell you what,” he said a minute later, staring down the lawn, “that grill out there, in season? You could wipe them out with a taco truck.”

  We went out together that evening. I telephoned Lucy again and discussed recent progress. I was due back at the lab in two more weeks. Perhaps I’d commute by ferry, as Betsy had always envisioned. The ending, as of yet, was unwritten. Joel grilled salmon steaks for dinner and we split a bottle of mineral water. Joel watched the news, shouting at Tom Brokaw, then went to bed early while I sat in the living room and reread my genealogy entry, now a total of a hundred pages, making final adjustments and rewriting through the night, drinking coffee, until six in the morning, when I printed out a copy and left it on the table for Joel to review.

  I went outside and tried the water. It was freezing. I went for a short swim anyway, toward Bar Harbor, where the lights were being absorbed by the sunrise. Then I went inside and added a postscript to Sara’s section. It wasn’t quite right for a book, but it would fit on an index card.

  Sara,

  These lines I’m writing for myself. Not for us. Not for you.

  How was I to know grieving took faith? The same for living.

  I know it. I name it.

  I’m beginning to know the distance between me and everything else.

  And I have the faith to collapse it.

  I leap.

  Our love exists apart. Underneath me, above me and all around.

  I hold your face in my hands.

  And I let go.

  author’s note

  My deep gratitude to: Ann Baldwin, Crans Baldwin, Leslie Baldwin; Julie Bleha, Jessica Francis Kane, Woodwyn Koons, Chris Lee, Andrew Womack; Josh and Juliet Knowles; PJ Mark; Sean McDonald, Emily Bell, and everyone else at Riverhead; the scientists who allowed me to pick their brains and mangle their research; Mary Baldwin; and my wife, Rachel, for everything.