While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  I wanted to contribute to his pleasure somehow. It was the first response he’d had that I could read. “Well, we all dispersed,” I explained. “We went our separate ways and didn’t see each other again. Till now. So this . . . so our meeting really triggered it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He pointed at me suddenly. He’d stopped bouncing. “Did you give him any indication what you were going to do, that you were coming in here?”

  I shook my head. “I . . . I asked him what he expected me to do. I indicated to him, I guess, how uncomfortable it made me to know this. But I didn’t say . . . I didn’t say anything about what I was going to do.”

  “So how did you leave it, exactly?”

  “I didn’t, really. I just walked out.”

  “Walked out of . . . ?”

  “The Ritz. We’d been talking at the bar in the Ritz.”

  “The Ritz.” He pouted. “That’s pretty far from western Mass.”

  “Well, he works in town. And I was in for the day.”

  “And you haven’t spoken since.”

  I shook my head again.

  “So your guess would be that he does not know you’ve come in here.”

  “No, though he will figure it out the instant you contact him. If that’s what you’ll do. Is it?”

  “Yes. I imagine so.” He nodded several times. “What we’ll do is, we’ll pull the box, go over everything and see how it comes together with this new information, and then we’ll try to talk to him.”

  “What do you mean, try?”

  “Well, we’ll see. Maybe he’ll be very willing, maybe he’ll come right in and tell us the same thing he told you. And maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll be more defensive, want to have an attorney present, be very careful about giving us any answers at all. Maybe he’ll deny it.” He lifted his shoulders. “And so forth. We’ll have to see how it all comes together.”

  I felt included in his we, somehow. “Do you think . . . will I have to testify against him? In a trial?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see what we’ve got, and take it to the DA if it looks likely, and he’ll take it from there. But we’ve got some baby steps first, so we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here. There are a lot of possible ways for him to respond, and a lot depends on that.” He shrugged. “At this point, I really don’t know much.”

  “But you will pursue it.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, don’t worry about that. No, this thing is in motion now.”

  “Will you let me know . . . will you keep me informed about . . . what happens?”

  “When there’s anything to tell you, we will. And you can call me, anytime. Anything else comes up, or you remember anything else, you can call me.” He had stood up now and was extracting a card from the wallet he’d taken out of his back pocket. As he handed it to me, he said, “And if he gets in touch again, anything threatening, or frightening to you, you call. Right away.” He pointed at me again, thumb cocked, gunlike.

  I nodded, feeling an overwhelming rush of gratitude, of relief. They would take care of me. It would be taken care of. It would go away. It was in their hands now.

  On the way home, I drove down Lyman Street. I had to circle back twice through the warren of one-way streets to figure out how to get onto it, but I would have known the house anywhere. It was remarkably unchanged, though most of the other houses around it had been improved, or rebuilt elegantly, or drastically modified. Several of them were painted in luscious Victorian colors, three or four tones to a house, the differences emphasizing sculpted details or patterned shingling, bits of dentiled or curved trim that had in our day been covered in siding.

  Our house still wore its ugly asphalt, though the mildew had been cleaned. The porch rail had been ripped out and entirely replaced with too-skinny, too-flimsy-looking wrought iron. The snow had stopped falling now, but it lay in wind-driven ripples against the foundation of the house, against the thick bases of the shrubs and the stubby irregular clumps of frozen crabgrass on the lawn. The first-floor windows were uncurtained and blank. On the second floor, though, what looked as if they could be the same crooked, tattered shades were hanging. The idea that this had once been a place of warmth or cheer or fellow feeling seemed laughable.

  When I told Daniel that night what I’d done, his head dropped forward, his neck bent, as though I’d struck him.

  “I see,” he said finally. He was sitting opposite me in the living room, his hands full of white envelopes. He’d started to go through the mail. I hadn’t known when I’d tell him, exactly, or why, but there was something about how closed off from me he’d suddenly seemed, sitting there with his mail, that made it feel essential to cut through to him with whatever I had. Turning Eli in was what I had, then.

  Daniel sat back and set the mail down on the table next to his chair. He stretched his long legs out toward me. He was in stocking feet, old brown socks, worn thin at the heel and the ball of each foot. His hands rose to his face, and he gouged at his eyes fiercely with his thumbs for a moment. “And what happens now?” he asked, suddenly looking directly at me. His eyes were reddened.

  “They can’t quite tell me, it seems. They’ll reinvestigate. They’ll talk to Eli. They’ll see what happens.”

  “But it will open it all up. There’ll be a trial.”

  “There could be, yes.”

  His chest rose fully once, and fell.

  “Daniel, I’m glad. I’m glad it’s done.”

  “Done, Joey?” he said. He seemed to be faintly smiling. “It’s just beginning.” He looked at me briefly, and then he got up. He went into the bedroom.

  After a minute, I followed him. I stood in the doorway and watched him. He was undressing, not looking at me. At last I said, “Daniel, it would have happened whether or not I’d . . . been attracted to Eli.”

  He looked up at me. “What? What would have happened?”

  “I would have gone to the police with this.”

  He shook his head, his mouth a tight line. “You never would have known about this, any of it, if you hadn’t been attracted to him. Your attraction—your word, not mine—invited it, invited this . . . confidence of his.”

  He’d taken off all his clothes now, and he’d turned to me. His pale, nearly hairless body was as lean and corded as it had been in his youth, with long, shapely muscles. The flesh was looser, though, and his penis, too, hung more loosely. Sometimes when I looked at him, I was reminded of older male animals—lions, tigers—and the sagging swing of their genitals. To me this had always been sweet. Now I was filled with such longing for his nakedness to mean something for us, for his body to feel mine again—ours—that tears came quickly up, a hot pressure behind my eyes.

  I sat down on the bed. “Daniel,” I said, my voice tremulous. “What can I do, what can I say, to make things better?”

  He shook his head, his lips tightened. “That’s the wrong question, Joey. That’s not how it works.”

  “How does it work, then?”

  “It’s something about how you have to be.”

  He left the room. I heard him cross the hall. Then there was a short silence, and I heard his bare feet padding back. He stood in the doorway. “Why did it have to be another secret, Jo?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t understand why you couldn’t have said to me this morning, ‘I’m going to talk to the police today.’ Why is it always necessary to hold something back?”

  “What difference does it make? Would it have made?”

  He looked at me as though he didn’t know who I was. Then he turned and went into the bathroom. The door shut. In a few moments I heard the tumble of running water and then, rising from the basement, the heartbeat throb of the old pump.

  When Cass was at her most difficult, I occasionally panicked, convinced she was using drugs or in danger of getting pregnant or about to run away. I spied on her. I went through her room when she was at school. I dug deep in her drawers, checked all her pockets for hidden
stashes. I read letters and notes she kept in her desk or in a box in her closet. I felt so guilty about this that I talked to several other mothers about what they did—not to Daniel; I knew what he’d think of me. We divided about in half as a group, the other mothers and I: those who never sneaked around, those who did. It didn’t make me feel any more comfortable about it, but I excused myself. Even when I thought about those trusting, honorable other mothers, I excused myself. I told myself that they didn’t have Cassie. Cassie, who could look you coolly in the eye and deny what you knew, absolutely knew, to be true.

  Once, I saw her driving a friend’s car, one hand draped out the window, waving a cigarette around. She was fourteen at the time, and not only did she not have a license but I had no idea when and where she’d learned how to drive. I had intermittently suspected she smoked—she often smelled of cigarettes—but I had tried to deny it to myself by blaming the fast crowd she was with. Sitting in cars, sitting in teenage bedrooms around town with all that smoke, of course she’d stink.

  When I asked her casually about it one day—had anyone been teaching her to drive? maybe she’d like lessons?—she looked at me steadily and said no. When I told her then that I’d seen her, she got furious. She said I’d tried to trap her, trick her, she accused me of not trusting her. She said I was dishonest, because I’d been so indirect, “so fucking devious.” And around we went.

  The most painful episode for me at around this time was finding a journal she’d been keeping. I was a sort of bogeyman in this book, a nightmare figure of falsity and hypocrisy and self-satisfaction. She wrote: “God, I hope I will never be as unconscious of how stupid I seem as Mother is, constantly trying to be so nice to all my friends, laughing and ridiculously flirty for someone her age, while she’s meanwhile grilling everybody about me, about where we go, what we do together, etc. etc.” And: “Mother just left my room—my room, which she acts like she can come in whenever she wants. Big fucking stink: I was late getting back last night, so now I must be punished. ‘What do you think would be appropriate, Cass?’ Well how do I fucking know? Why doesn’t she just say what she thinks, why isn’t she honest enough just to be angry and invent her own goddamn punishment? No. There has to be this fake talk. Doesn’t she realize????? we are ENEMIES!!!! Meanwhile, she’s sitting on MY bed, touching MY stuff. There is nothing about her that doesn’t disgust me.”

  It was painful, of course, to read this, but in the end I’m glad I did. It helped me know how to be around Cass. I had thought that what was most important was that she feel loved, that I continue to behave as lovingly toward her as I could. But it seemed she needed from me an austerity that honestly matched the distance between us. I began to provide it.

  None of this made her warmer then, or easier, but it did feel oddly more comfortable to me not to pretend to any warmth, not really ever to wish any longer for ease. Simply to give up for a while and have my love be utterly a private, unexpressed thing, waiting for a signal from her that some aspect of it might be welcome. And perhaps in some way all of that restraint helped allow for our long, slow rapprochement. I don’t know.

  I felt similarly chastened now in my relations to Daniel. I think what I had hoped was that by pretending things were better between us I could make them become better. I think I did hope that there was something I could do or say that would make a difference. But the lesson I was learning was that everything I did partook of me, of the things in me that had made him turn away in the first place. I saw that I couldn’t, for the moment, try to change things with him. That when I did, I would inevitably do it in my own unwelcome way, and that would only make things worse. I would be secretive, because that was something that was part of me. I would sweep too much of his pain aside, because I so wanted it to be over, because I tried to make things happen at my own pace. I would attack him, hurt him, wound him, disgust him, with my wish for things to be as I wanted them to be again, too fast.

  What I was beginning to understand was that simply to act was to affirm my inescapable self, to make exactly the kind of mistake I would make. It seemed that for the moment, to Daniel, I was all of a piece, full of a kind of odious integrity.

  Well, all right. Having children teaches you, I think, that love can survive your being despised in every aspect of yourself. That you need not collapse when the shriek comes: Don’t you get it? I hate you! But you do need to get it. You do need to understand and accept being hated. I think this is one of the greatest gifts children can give you, as long as it doesn’t last.

  Cass had taught me well. I turned away from Daniel now. I taught myself passivity.

  I was waiting anyway. Waiting for the police to call me back. I didn’t know what form the next step would take. I thought maybe Eli would call me. I’d stand at the mailbox in the gently falling snow and scan all the return addresses quickly, looking for . . . what? The district attorney’s office? The Cambridge police? Homicide? It occurred to me Eli might write me. Or Larry. Maybe they’d be in touch with Larry. Or Sara. Mightn’t they be called in for questioning? Or Dana’s sisters.

  What I most often imagined was the need for more questions to be answered. Was this what a grand jury might do? I didn’t know. Or I imagined Eli in a rage, threatening me, coming at me somehow. Or, less likely, Eli sorrowful—perhaps even redeeming himself to me by recognizing that what I’d done was right. I ran over the various alternatives in my mind, the dramas that might come next. I held my breath when the phone rang, I sorted hurriedly through the mail each day. It seemed to me I’d imagined every possible thing.

  I hadn’t thought of Jean. I hadn’t thought of Sadie.

  I stepped into the kitchen and heard Daniel’s voice at its chilliest: “And I don’t think you’re being fair.” It stopped me. So categorical. So cold. Whom would Daniel ever speak to in this way? I set down the heavy box I was carrying—a new humidifier; the old one was corroded with our mineral-rich well water—and started to take my hat and coat off, listening carefully. Some unpleasantness at the church, is what I thought.

  “I admit it seems nuts. But some things are nuts. Period. . . . Yes. Yes, I do. . . . Yes, I support her completely.”

  I hung my coat up.

  “Well, then, we’re both nuts.”

  I stood still, listening. “Sadie, no one is doing this to you. You happened to be in the line of fire, but . . .”

  And suddenly I understood. There’s been some fallout, some third-hand effect, on Sadie. Via Jean, of course. I stepped into the kitchen. Clearly Daniel had been waiting for me since he’d heard the back door open. He pointed to the phone, then raised his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows questioningly. I nodded and walked over to him.

  “Sadie?” he said. “Sade? Mom’s here now. You want to talk to her?”

  He covered the phone with his hand for a second. “Repercussions,” he said.

  I nodded and took the receiver from him.

  She began before I even said hello: “Mom, what are you doing?” Her voice was almost a shriek.

  “Slow down, sweetie, and tell me what—”

  “This stuff with Jean’s husband. I mean, you’re accusing him of murder?”

  “He accused himself, Sadie. He told me he did it.”

  “Mom.” The tone was that of an adult to a child with an overactive imagination.

  “How did you hear about it?” I asked.

  “Because you’ve ruined my life, that’s how! Because the whole special project I was going to do with Jean is down the toilet, that’s how.”

  I kept my voice calm. “Because she’s mad at me.”

  “Because she’s not sure she can separate this stuff in her head, so she told me she’d rather not do it. Or I had to find someone else. But I don’t want anyone else.” She paused for breath. She lowered her voice. “This was two credits, Mom. This was my whole semester. It was going to be part of my senior thesis eventually.”

  “I’m sorry, Sadie.”

  There was a silence.

&nbs
p; “Can’t you stop it? Can’t you undo it?” A little girl’s voice.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “God, Mom. By going to the police. By saying you made a mistake.”

  “But I didn’t make a mistake.”

  “What. Mr. Mayhew is a murderer.”

  “He told me so. Yes.”

  “Mom, he’s a famous scientist. He’s a . . . he’s a doctor. I mean, why would he say that to you?” She stopped for a few seconds. Then: “Did you have a lot to drink?”

  “That’s an insulting question, Sadie.”

  “God, this is so crazy!”

  “I know. But it’s real.”

  “But how come you never . . . I mean, it’s like you invented this whole thing. I mean, I never even knew you had a friend who was murdered . . . ?”

  “But I did,” I said. “She was . . . she was my friend.”

  “Yeah, well. Thanks for sharing.”

  “I am sorry, Sadie. For everything.”

  I listened to her breathe for a moment. Then she said, “Mom, look. Isn’t it possible you misunderstood him? Isn’t it possible you . . . I mean, had you had a lot to drink?”

  “No. No and no.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie.”

  “So you believe it, you honestly believe that Mr. Mayhew killed this . . . this friend.”

  “I do. And I’m really sorry—sorrier than I can say—that it has had any effect on you.”

  We were both silent. She spoke first. “I am just so blown away by all this. It’s like I can’t . . . So you won’t . . . you won’t change your mind.”

  “I can’t, Sadie.”

  “Well, there goes my academic career.” Her voice was flip, brittle, but I could hear she was near tears.