While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  “Do?”

  “Yes.” I was angry suddenly. At last. “How shall I live with it?”

  “Well, I don’t expect you to turn me over to the police.”

  So help me, I almost smiled back at him. Instead I asked, “Why not?”

  He laughed. As though I were joking. And ignored the question. “I suppose it could be said that I need a kind of forgiveness from you.” His face shifted. “But I’m not sure even that’s right. I’ve forgiven myself, after all, and as you once said, that seems the more important step. No, I think I’ve just felt a sense of our connection. Our connectedness, to get New Agey about it.”

  “I see.”

  He was looking at me now. Perhaps it was occurring to him for the first time that he might have made a mistake. But he must have imagined alternative responses from me when he thought about this encounter. He must have given me options in his mind—mustn’t he?—other than the one he was wishing for.

  I think perhaps he hadn’t. At any rate, when he began again, his demeanor shifted. He leaned forward over the table. His hands came over into what might have been designated as my territory. Someone watching us from across the room would have thought the moment had finally arrived for him to start to make love to me. “Do you remember saying to me once that you’d made an unforgivable mess of your life?” His voice was ragged with intimacy, sweet reason.

  I didn’t answer right away, though I did remember. But I saw where he was going, the parallel between our lives, and I didn’t want to consent to it. He waited, watching me. Finally I said, “Yes, I think so. I know I felt I had once. Yes.”

  “And that’s the point, isn’t it?” He smiled sadly. “The unforgivable things we’ve done. We’ve all done, I suspect. Like Daniel’s notion of original sin: we’re all tainted. And the only way we can forgive ourselves is by redefining our lives. That’s what I’ve tried to do, Jo. That’s what I’ve done. I can honestly balance what I’ve accomplished against the harm I’ve done and say the one far outweighs the other. I grant there may be others who’ve done less harm, but nowhere near the good. Nowhere near.”

  After a pause, I said, “But it wasn’t exactly penance, was it? I mean, you loved the work.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t see the relevance of that, honestly.”

  I wanted to leave. I was frightened of him, I realized. Not of his doing anything to me; I knew he wouldn’t. But of his apparent need to persuade me of his point of view. It seemed he wouldn’t let me go until he had.

  He was waiting, watching me. At last I said, “I don’t think it suffices to forgive yourself.”

  He lifted his hand. “Who, then? I can hardly get Dana to forgive me.”

  This more than anything, this casual near joke of everything that had happened—everything he’d done—shocked me. “I don’t know,” I said. I slid sideways, out of the booth. I’d kept my coat with me when I arrived, and now I was grateful for that. I picked it up. “I don’t know.”

  I walked quickly across the room. I turned at the doorway just as I reached it, and I saw he was standing now, too, throwing bills down on the table. His eyes met mine, and I felt a reasonless panic.

  In the lobby, I started toward the glass doors, toward the doorman and the people moving under the warm lights of the marquee. But nearly simultaneously, I realized that this was a kind of trap: I’d be standing there waiting for the valet to bring my car. Waiting for Eli.

  Instead, then, I moved into a group of people standing by the bank of elevators, and when one of the mirror-paneled doors opened almost immediately, I hurtled forward ahead of the others. The elevator operator smiled warmly at us as we assumed our places and gave our floor numbers. Someone else said four, so I did too. When he opened the doors and called the number, I stepped off with the pregnant mother and little girl who belonged there. I took a few steps behind them down the hall. Then I stopped. They went on, but I turned and came back to the door I’d noticed opposite the elevators, the door marked STAIRS.

  The instant I opened it, the plush murmurous world of the hotel’s life fell away. The floor was painted concrete, the rails were iron pipe. A cold fluorescent light fell evenly, harshly, over everything. I stood next to the closed door, listening to the rise and fall of my breath, the blood thudding in my ears and my chest. I was alone.

  I stood there for a while—I’m not sure how long—and then I heard someone enter the stairwell high above me, the quick, gritty tap of shoes on stone as he—she?—started down. I opened the door again to the carpeted hallway of the fourth floor, and slowly I walked around, pretending I had a purpose, a destination. I came to a seating area in the corridor and stood looking out the windows there at the massive trees in the Public Garden, the lights twinkling through them. I kept seeing Eli’s face, hearing his pleading, reasoning voice. I kept pushing away the image of Dana, Dana as I remembered finding her. And now this new version of her, too, stepping forward to offer comfort and being struck, over and over. I heard myself make a noise, and sat down, quickly, trying to gather myself. A couple came out of one of the rooms down the hall and walked past me to the elevators, talking in low voices.

  A few minutes later, I followed them. They’d already disappeared. I pushed the down button. There was a mirror on the wall behind me. I turned and looked at myself in it. I was haggard, white. I looked away. When the elevator doors opened, I stepped in.

  Getting the car from the valet brought me back sharply to myself, made me feel aware of my own stupidity. My cupidity. My vanity. For what had I said when I took the stub from him earlier? “I’m not sure how long I’ll be, exactly. I may stay the night.” “It’s possible that I’ll be spending the night.” “It’s possible that I’ll start an affair tonight with Eli Mayhew.”

  His cheerful innocence now was a rebuke to me: “Decided not to stay, huh?”

  “No,” I said. And I stepped back into the glass vestibule to wait for the car, every few moments glancing into the lobby, then out to the pavement, watching for Eli.

  It was such a relief to me—first to be closed in alone in the car, then to get onto Route 2 and be headed out of Boston, then to feel the silent dark of the countryside surround me—that I was well past Lincoln before I felt the weight of all that had happened. Somewhere after the sign to Walden Pond, I pulled off the highway, onto a dark lane. I parked at its edge. As soon as I turned off the engine, I burst into ragged weeping.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I stopped crying several times and then started again. I thought of Dana, of the noise of my breath leaking wetly from her cheek where Eli had sliced her open. I thought of my blindness, the shameful vanity that had brought me to Boston today, that had tricked me, exposed me. I thought of how Eli had counted on me, of how he had been so sure I would forgive him. My mouth tasted bitter and tired. I blew my nose over and over, I darkened tissue after tissue with my eye makeup. I thought of Eli’s false words: he hit her, he had said. Liar! Fucking liar. I thought of Dana as I’d found her, of the bloody flaps of fabric and skin at the torn edges of each wound, of the drying blood on the dirty soles of her bare white feet. I thought of the weight of her body when I tried to carry her with me.

  A car turned off the road and drove slowly toward me. Instead of passing by, though, it pulled up behind me, its beams lighting the inside of my car, showing me my frightened eyes in the rearview mirror. Eli! I thought, and panicked. I heard his car door slam, the slow, heavy footsteps on gravel. I was fumbling for my keys, trying to start the car, to loosen the steering wheel lock, when he tapped on my window. The engine caught with a sharp whine of protest, and I was starting to shift when he bent down.

  It wasn’t Eli. It was a policeman. Young, hatted, his white face just inches from me, he frowned at me through the dirty glass.

  Daniel must have heard the car crunching on the frozen ruts of the driveway, or seen the lights skittering over the bare trees and the barn, for he came to the kitchen door to greet me, his glasses in one hand.
His face lifted in surprise and pleasure as he stepped back to let me in. “Hey, I didn’t expect to see you for hours. If at all tonight. What happened?” And then he noticed I’d been crying and moved toward me. “What’s wrong?”

  I stood utterly still for a moment, I was so glad to be here—home—but also so ashamed, so conscious that what came next would change everything. Then I said, “Well, see, Daniel, the thing is, I went to Boston. . . .” I took a breath. “The real reason I went to Boston was to meet Eli Mayhew.” And watched as his eager, loving expression was utterly transformed.

  CHAPTER

  12

  I said earlier that running away from my first marriage was unique in my life, that it was hard for me to recognize or remember myself as I was then because the behavior was so foreign to me.

  But that was not, strictly, true. I ran away once as a girl, too, at perhaps eight or nine. I didn’t get far, but if intentions had been wings, I would have landed in Florida, in Brigadoon. In never-never land. As it was, I made several mistakes and was easily retrieved. The primary one was stealing my brother Fred’s cowboy boots.

  I’d long coveted them. They were red, with white appliqués stitched on them—crescent moons and stars. From the moment he’d unwrapped them the Christmas before, I felt that if there were any justice, any fairness in the world, I would have known about the existence of these boots. I would have asked for them for myself. They would be mine, not his. Now, on this dusty summer afternoon, I sneaked into Fred’s room and found them in his closet. I carried them to the front porch. I pulled them on and set out on my journey: down to the corner and left onto the street that became the road that led out of town, the place where all the journeys I’d ever known began.

  The boots swam freely around my feet as I walked. It was a hot day; my feet were damp with sweat. Within the equivalent of a few city blocks, I had blisters on both heels. At a point shortly after that, I took the boots off and left them in the tall grass that grew by the road. I went on, barefoot, slowed by pebbles and glass. I was hobbling and miserable when a neighbor saw me from her car and stopped. “Dearie,” she called. “You’ve headed the wrong way!”

  I let her talk me into the car, I consented to let her drive me home. But nearly as soon as we started back, I burst into tears—at the thought of my failure, at my barefoot shame. At the enormity of my sin in stealing my brother’s boots, at the fear of being punished. By the time we got home, I was inconsolable, so inconsolable that there was only sympathy for my bleeding bare feet, for my hysteria, for my having been—as they understood it—lost.

  And what triggered that flight? What was the itch that time? This: My older brother had told me—it seems to me only a few days before, but it might have been weeks, or even months—about my father’s previous life, his first marriage. I don’t know why he chose the moment. Some smugness on my part he wanted to pierce. Some casual remark that seemed to claim ownership of our parents’ history. Some minor offense to him. At any rate, he told. Cruelly, harshly, the correction being to my stupidity for not having known earlier—though how could I? no one had even hinted at it—that our father had had another wife, another whole existence, before he met our mother, before we were born. That if things had been as he first planned them, we never would have been born, there would have been other children living in our house, with another mother, with different rules, different notions of what was important in life.

  This shattered my understanding of the universe, the feeling I’d had—I think every child has it until some point in life—that my life was somehow sacred and foreordained, the one absolutely necessary life I had to live.

  Apparently not. Apparently I might never have been. Or I might have been other than what I was.

  And, it occurred to me then, mightn’t I yet be? It seemed suddenly that what had been the cornerstone of my existence was shifting sand. That what had been a given was merely a whim. It seemed possible that there was another life waiting somewhere out there for me. This was not exactly how I thought it out, of course. Mostly I felt it: a yearning, suddenly justified, for something other for myself. Better. More real somehow. More like the lives I read about in my books.

  Later the boots turned up missing, causing my mother to ponder retroactively the mystery of blistered heels on a barefoot girl. A new interpretation was arrived at, and I was walked down the road, made to find the boots—rain-soaked and stiffened, curled, ruined!—and punished.

  I don’t mean to trivialize my feelings on coming home to Daniel by comparing them to that other homecoming. On the contrary. For that early shame felt deep and permanent, a stain I would wear forever, an agony I was condemned to wake to over and over, a final isolation I’d brought on myself by turning in the wrong direction, heading the wrong way, when I was confused and wounded.

  Each day now, too, I woke and felt something very like that agonized wrench of childhood. Sometimes Daniel was not in bed with me. He’d gotten up, sleepless, and gone to one of the girls’ rooms. Or out to his study. Then the disorientation, the pain, lay in his absence, in my aloneness in the bed. Sometimes I was the one who’d moved in the night. I’d wake with the light falling from the wrong direction, the bed turned, dizzyingly, the wrong way; and in the seconds it took to orient myself physically, I would be returning, too, with a sinking weight in what felt like my heart, to what I’d done. To all it seemed I’d destroyed. It was like waking over and over to an illness, a long fever I could not recover from.

  My brother had said to me then, “I’ll never speak to you again.” Of course, I believed him, and what’s more, I believed I deserved it. Daniel might as well have said it, though we spoke daily, we exchanged information about where we were going, about what time we’d be back. And occasionally more. Tonelessly he’d sometimes tell me he’d run into someone I knew, or report on something he’d seen, something that had happened to him—the kind of thing that would once have been the beginning of a long, meandering conversation. But these were offered so listlessly now that I understood them to be mere formalities. Just as Daniel would not stop saying good morning to me, or how was your day?—just as he would make himself be civil to me in those ways—so he would politely, dutifully offer me nuggets that neither of us had the energy to turn into conversation.

  Though at odd moments, the silence between us would be broken by the quickest, the most radical of exchanges about what was truly important to us. One of us would blurt out just a sentence or two, as though we couldn’t bear to keep at it any longer than that, as though one idea at a time was all either of us could express or take in. These were sometimes preceded, these cries from the heart, by an oddly formal introduction: “Allow me, Daniel, just to say I never meant for it to go as far as it did.” And the quick answer: “I’m sure that’s true.” . . . “I would ask that you never see him again.”: “Of course not.” Once, in bed, long after I would have assumed he’d fallen asleep—just before he got up and went to sleep elsewhere—he suddenly said in a rough, low-pitched voice, “I don’t know how to stop thinking about it.”

  For once, my work was no consolation; the world did not fall away when I moved among the animals. As I touched them, as I manipulated them, as I treated them and thought about them, I was still too much myself, too much the Jo who’d wrecked everything. I didn’t know anymore what it felt like to take satisfaction in anything. I couldn’t remember when I had liked myself or anything about my life. My very voice made me sick: its dryness, the way it cracked on certain words. I hated my need to smile at clients. I hated the sight of my ugly shoes emerging from underneath my scrub pants, the way my hands looked arranging things on my table, the way my body felt as I moved around the clinic in it. Though when Mary Ellen spoke to me quickly, privately in the hall one day, offering to pick up the slack for a week or two if I wanted some time off, I understood by the panicked rapidity of my refusal how much worse things would be if I couldn’t come in every day.

  A week passed since I had met Eli.
Then ten days. The world froze and we froze in it. The bird feeder hung empty. We opened the door and let the dogs run at night instead of walking them. Neither of us had the energy to make our bed, or any of the beds we variously slept in. Or to pick up, to build a fire, to throw away rotting fruit or dried-out flowers or the old take-out containers that accumulated in the refrigerator. I felt I was living on pure will. Every act was a deliberate one, costly and difficult. I’ve said that once I felt held in my life. Now I was holding on to what was left of it for dear life. Dear life. While below our tepid, empty exchanges, the deep moat of silence widened between us.

  Of course, we had talked the night I came back. But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed. I suppose in some way I knew how it would be even as I was blurting out my confession, but I couldn’t have—I think I couldn’t have—stopped myself anyhow.

  Why? Why couldn’t I have kept quiet? I asked myself that often in the days that followed. Why hadn’t I spared him my painful, ugly little secret and kept things the same between us?

  I suppose the answer in part is that the weight of what I’d learned and the power of the emotional state I was in were so heavy and deep, it felt they had become me. I felt I had no choice. I didn’t, in fact, think about an alternative. I suppose it was in part because I needed Daniel so much, right then, that my need made me stupid. I suppose I was so caught up with what Eli had said and the way it altered my own history that I wasn’t thinking about how my confession would alter ours. But even as I spoke, had to speak, I was thinking: This, this is what you’ve done.

  “Oh, God, Daniel,” I’d said when I saw his face change, saw it go white. “Let’s sit down, let’s get a drink or something, and then I’ll tell you the whole story.” I think at first I felt that if he heard all of it, if I explained it in exactly the right way, he would see how it had been, how I had been in it. He would be, as he always was, so with me that he could feel it as I had felt it, he could help me now with my terror, my horror. And I think I hoped, too, that there would be a way made available for my words not to mean what they had seemed to mean.