Far from Here

by Nicole Baart

  “I know, Danica.”

  “I should be old and gray. I should have the consolation of a lifetime behind me. Children and grandchildren . . .” Dani’s chest was heaving, her breaths were ragged, ripped from the air. “It’s not fair!”

  “It’s not fair,” Char agreed, catching Dani by the wrists and holding tight. “But think of what you did have. Ten years, sweet girl. Ten years of the sort of love most of us will never know.”

  “Etsell cheated on me.” It sounded so impossible, so surreal, that for a moment Dani was sure her mother wouldn’t even be able to understand the words.

  “What?” Char’s indignant expression was muddied with confusion.

  Something inside of Dani collapsed and crumbled to dust. She felt as if she were being sifted, every atom separated through a sieve that left her without form or boundary or purpose. She held her breath, afraid that if she so much as exhaled, the devastation would be complete. “In Alaska.” Her voice was barely audible. “With that woman from the Midnight Sun.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She showed up at my door last night. She told me what happened between them.”

  Char’s mouth hardened into a furious line. “That little bitch. Why? Why would she—”

  “It’s my fault,” Dani interrupted, yanking her arms from her mother’s stranglehold. “I did this to him. I did this to us. And now he’s gone and he can never forgive me for what I’ve done, and I can never forgive him. . . .”

  “Dani—”

  “Marriage is so hard,” she whispered. “I mean, we loved each other, we really did, but nobody told me that years would go by and in the end we wouldn’t be the same people as we were when we began.”

  Char reached for Dani’s hands again and took them in her own, plaiting their fingers together like they were little girls. “Shhh,” she said, pulling her closer, holding her gaze. “Don’t do that. You loved each other. You said so yourself. That’s the best anyone can do.”

  “But it wasn’t enough, was it? He left me.”

  “He went to Alaska, and he got lost. He didn’t leave you.”

  “He slept with her.”

  “It was a mistake.” Char squeezed her daughter’s hands so tight it hurt. “You know that, right? That it was a mistake?”

  “She’s having his baby.”

  Dani watched Char blink, a rapid-fire reaction that matched the flutter of her mouth. “What?” she finally managed, a question so tiny, so quiet, Dani would never have heard it if she wasn’t standing less than a foot away.

  “They fought,” Dani continued. “He regretted it, and he wanted to tell me, but Sam tried to convince him that I didn’t need to know. And then he took off. No destination. No flight plan.”

  “He disappeared,” Char finished. She pressed her eyes closed as if making a wish, as if the harder she hoped, the more likely it was that her dreams would come true. “And you believe her? You believe that she’s telling the truth?”

  “I didn’t want to, but why would she lie? Why would she fly all the way across the continent to torture me? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Char nodded, past the point of shock, obviously trying to process everything her daughter was throwing at her. “What about Ell? Did he know about . . . ?”

  “The baby? I can’t imagine that he did. He was only in Alaska for three weeks. I got the impression . . . I got the impression it only happened once.”

  “Murphy’s law.”

  Dani pulled away from her mother and took a few steps back. She glanced at the door longingly, wondered what would happen if she ran for it and didn’t stop. If she did something almost frighteningly out of character. If she just let go. But instead of fleeing, she made a pass at the tears that had already dried on her cheeks. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” Char sank back into the chair and stared at herself in the mirror over the sink. They stayed like that for a moment, mother and daughter framed by the gilt edge of the mirror Dani had picked out with Ell, a tableau of loss. In the second before Dani turned her around again, Char caught her daughter’s eye. “He loved you, Danica.”

  “Still.” It was all Dani could bring herself to say, and it seemed to hold everything in the breath of that one little sigh. Nevertheless, even now, yet. Regardless of time and love and promises. We were one, and still . . .

  “What are you going to do?” Char asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  But Char didn’t answer. Instead, she asked, “That’s why she came, isn’t it? To give you a choice?”

  Dani had purposefully kept that part of the conversation from her mom, but in spite of her numerous flaws and shortcomings, Char could be frustratingly perceptive when it came to people. Especially when she could relate to the person in question. Dani wondered, briefly, if Char had ever considered getting rid of her own inconveniences—the three girls who had pushed her meager income to the limit and assured that her life would be little more than one trial after another. She tried to picture her mother in a Planned Parenthood clinic or sitting in a frayed office chair at an adoption agency. The scene wouldn’t come into focus.

  “Why did you keep us?” Dani surprised herself by voicing an impossible question.

  “For the same reason that girl came to you.” Char said, completely unfazed. She lifted one hand to push a weeping foil off her forehead, then pressed her fingertips against the corner of her eye as if to pat her makeup into place. “Because I couldn’t imagine it any other way.”

  Danica

  I thought about writing a letter. A letter that I would never send—could never send—and that he would never read. But there were words on my tongue, things I longed to say that stuck to the roof of my mouth for lack of an audience to hear them. They made me feel trapped and breathless, sick with the knowledge that I was full of things I could never release, an illness that threatened to consume me. And when my jaw ached from holding it all inside, I found my fingers itched, tense with the need to let it out somewhere. Anywhere. Even if it was on page after page of paper that I would then rip to tiny shreds, the refuse of a life undone.

  What did I imagine would happen if I took a pen to paper? That my scribbled confessions would mirror the plea he scrawled over and over on the note that I still carried in my pocket? That we would find a way in the reflection to touch? To let it all go? I loved my husband and hated him in equal measure. I blamed him and I blamed myself.

  In the weeks after Samantha appeared on my doorstep, summer quietly doled out the last remaining warm days and slipped away like a thief. Natalie went back to New York at the beginning of September, leaving me with nothing but a look that smacked of pity, and a quick, fierce hug that belied her final words, “Chin up, Danica Reese.” She sounded almost chipper, but she feared for me. I caught it in the glance she threw over her shoulder, the way she held my gaze a second longer than necessary, searching for something that she didn’t find.

  After my conversation with Char in the salon, I expected Etsell’s betrayal to be front-page news in Blackhawk. My mother was not one to keep confidences, but for some reason my personal hell proved to be the linchpin that finally sealed her mouth tight. She didn’t breathe a word of any of it to Natalie or even Kat, and when Char stepped out of La Rue with a headful of soft, tawny waves, she gave me a wicked wink and said, “Not bad.” One flick of her new ’do and it was as if the moment we shared had slipped away with the water down the drain.

  I spun in a vacuum of my own design with no one to talk to and no way out. So I wrote. When the measure of my days was even, dull with the steady tedium of work and the motions of a hollow life, I bought a notebook and began to pen letters to my dead husband. One word at a time, one page at a time. And when all the lines were full, I’d rip the sheet from top to bottom and make confetti of my scattered thoughts.

  In the beginning I tried to pretend that Sam had never come, that the chasm torn between me and the memory of Ell didn’t exist. But I trip
ped into it at the most unexpected of times, fell headlong into my reality and landed so hard I eventually learned to hold her—and her baby—beside me. I could control them there. I could watch them out of the corner of my eye so that they weren’t able to sneak up on me when I was least prepared for their unwelcome appearance.

  It was a careful balance.

  I was learning to survive in a place between, an existence where, if I breathed shallowly and clutched my secrets close, I could pass the hours like prayer beads between my fingers. One and another, a few more before I had to begin again. A careful repetition. A state of counterfeit peace. But when I woke up on September 10, my heart was fumbling for purchase, spinning and racing and stalling, and I knew my wary construction was little more than a house of sand.

  It took me most of the day to realize why I was so out of sorts. And when I remembered, it was all in a rush, an onslaught of emotion that left me struggling for air.

  Ten years. It was ten years to the day since Ell and I had gone on our very first date, the night that cemented our future and started us on the journey that led me, alone, to this moment. I could hardly picture us back then—children, really, with no way of knowing all that was to come. There was something melancholy in the air, a bittersweet note that hung over me as I flashed through those first encounters like slides that had gone fuzzy around the edges.

  I remembered the box just as the sun started to set, and realized with a dark thrill that Kat wouldn’t be back from work for hours. Whipping on a jacket, I stuck my feet in a pair of Mary Janes and hurried out to the shed. The faltering twilight was cool and dusty, dulled by the dirt kicked up from the first few combines that marked the very beginning of harvest. It had been a hot summer, and autumn would produce record crops. All the experts said so. Usually I loved this time of year, the way the air turned brittle according to the forecast and the leaves began to change. The yield of the fertile earth never ceased to make me pause, but now the breeze seemed somehow ominous as I threw open the shed door, sneezing and displacing weeks of grime.

  The spade was lying across the floor, despondent, where I had thrown it after planting those few bushes that Benjamin had gifted me. There were clumps of dry, ashy soil still clinging to the tip, and as I made my way to the willow, I tried to beat them off against the ground.

  We had buried the capsule in the exact place where a knot in the tree seemed to point a gnarled finger at a dip in the grass. It was Etsell’s idea, a notion that I cheerfully embraced when he came home from a flight to Minneapolis with a diminutive carved chest, hewn from a wood I couldn’t identify, something swirled with an equal mix of dark and light that had been varnished to a gloss as hard and shiny as polished stone. Ell said it came from a tree that grew only in West Africa. He had found it in a little shop along a forgotten alley, a place that he was drawn to because of the scent of fresh tobacco and an unfamiliar spice that for some reason reminded him of his mother.

  “It’s precious,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Just think of how far it came. Just think of what we could put in it.”

  I ran my fingers up the line of buttons on his shirt and grabbed him by the collar. Pulled him close for a kiss. “It’s a time capsule. You’re making it sound like something far more mysterious. A treasure.”

  “It is a treasure!” Ell feigned a hurt expression, but he was too excited to keep it up.

  “Only crazy people make time capsules out of wood. It’ll rot.”

  “Not this wood.” Etsell smirked. “The guy I bought it from said it’s hard as a rock. Indestructible. Besides”—he tapped the top with his fingertips—“nothing is getting through this gloss. Come on, we’ll fill it with secrets, and then dig it up when we’re old and gray. Remember that movie? The one where the old lady gets Alzheimer’s and can’t remember her own husband? When you’re all wrinkled and confused and wearing Depends, I’ll use it to remind you of who you are. Of who we are.”

  “How romantic.” I laughed, rolling my eyes.

  Etsell lifted me off the ground for a moment and buried his face in my neck. “I adore you,” he whispered against my warm skin. “You complete me.”

  “Thanks, Jerry Maguire.”

  “You make me want to be a better man.”

  “Jack Nicholson?” I guessed.

  “La vita è bella; la vita è amore.”

  “Oh, now you’re just showing off.” I punched him in the arm and wiggled out of his grip, but he had already cast his spell—in my mind I was considering and rejecting the things I would tuck in his little Pandora’s box.

  We were young, and in the end we weren’t very creative. There was a photo from our wedding, a candid shot of Etsell smearing a bite of French vanilla cake laced with raspberry cream across my cheek. Before the reception I had made him promise that he wouldn’t do that, but at the last minute he changed his mind and dragged the frosting from the corner of my mouth to my ear like a stripe of war paint. I would have been angry except that he walked me to the bathroom under the guise of helping me clean up and then licked up every last trace with his warm tongue.

  And we used a recipe card to write down a list of our favorites: favorite movies and books, television shows and dinners we made together. Etsell slipped in a CD that he had burned for us, a mix of Coltrane and Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald that was still strange to me. Strange and discordant and jarringly lovely, but worth every unexpected note because, for some reason that I didn’t yet understand, it spoke beauty over my husband.

  I couldn’t really remember what else we crammed in that box, and when I finally saw the edge of it peeking from the hole I had dug at the base of our weeping willow, I felt a jolt of electricity rush through me. Tossing the spade aside, I knelt at the edge of the shallow trench and finished the excavation with my hands.

  We had wrapped our package in an old burlap bag, and as I carefully peeled the covering back, I was relieved to see that time hadn’t aged the chest much. Its sleek sides were still smooth as glass, and the simple latch still glimmered in the final glow of sunlight. It was heavy in my arms, weighted with the vows that our younger selves had so blithely made, and all the hope that we had crammed inside.

  I fell back on my haunches and rested the box on my thighs, holding it gently with my palms flat against the high sides, trying with every ounce of my being to resist the urge to fling it against the tree. To watch the wood splinter. Or maybe I wanted to hold it close, to hug the sharp corners against my chest where I could pretend, if only for a minute, that everything was unbroken.

  Lies, I thought. Lies and deception and broken promises and a life of loss like water through my hands. But before I knew what I was doing, my fingers were tracing the line of the lid, caressing it almost as I remembered doing the afternoon we put it in the ground. The dirt we threw over it a handful at a time, as if we were burying our dreams in a place where they had no choice but to grow.

  “I can’t wait to dig it up with you someday,” Etsell had said.

  “Do you think we’ll be different?”

  “Undoubtedly.” Ell caught my hand. Squeezed. “What could be more exciting?”

  I don’t know how long I stayed beneath the tree like that: my head bent over a forgotten box, my hands cupping the sides gentle as a wish. But when I finally flicked the edge of the latch free with my thumbnail, my legs were numb and it was far too dark to see the contents of the small treasure chest. I had the impression of paper and a slim CD case, the muted shine of a photograph, and a few dark shapes I couldn’t identify. It didn’t matter. I didn’t particularly want to pull anything out, to lay it across my kitchen table and dissect it as if I could unearth a vein of misfortune, of the tragedy that was to come in the flicker of our innocence.

  Instead, I reached inside and felt blindly for the one last thing that I knew inhabited the depths. It was there, I found it almost instantly: a cold ring of woven metal that Ell had made for me after we had been together for one year. It was braided from the narrow th
read of a wire that he twisted and then soldered together. A homemade gift. A promise of sorts.

  “Every single time I take off I have to do a preflight check,” he told me. “I have to make sure all the flaps are working and test the weights and double-check the tension of every little wire. That’s where this came from.” He held up the slender ring.

  “Don’t you need that wire?” I cocked an eyebrow at him playfully.

  Etsell ignored me. Reached for my hand and slid the ring onto my finger. It was a bit big, but it caught just below my knuckle and stayed. “Without this tiny piece I’d crash. It’s indispensable. Absolutely necessary. I wouldn’t survive without it.” He trailed off, incapable of articulating exactly what he was trying to say. Or maybe he wanted to let me fill in the blanks, draw my own conclusions about the boy I already claimed I loved. But though he seemed at a loss for words, he bent his head to kiss the ring on my finger, as solemn as a blessing.

  He replaced that homemade piece of jewelry when he proposed just over a year later. And the truth was, I was grateful. The wire cut, and the jagged edge where he hadn’t soldered it properly snagged my sweaters. But I kept it in a small, beaded bag tucked deep in my underwear drawer, and when Ell came up with the idea for our time capsule, I happily resurrected it for inclusion in our project. It belonged with the mementos of our relationship.

  The wind was starting to nip at my ears when I tried the ring on for the first time in nearly eight years. I was surprised to find that it slid easily past my knuckles. But it was too loose; the ring threatened to fall off and get lost in the gray-brown grass below my knees. So I put Etsell’s creation between my lips, and eased off the platinum band that hadn’t left my hand since the day we said, “I do.” The skin beneath felt cool and exposed, naked in the autumn dusk. I quickly shoved the wire ring on and replaced my wedding band as a seal above it. The entire ensemble felt strange and bulky, but the discomfort was almost welcome. A reminder.