by Kaya McLaren
A lot of things went through Amy’s head at once. First, that Helen had even considered it was touching. Second, that losing her own hair was so painful, she wouldn’t wish it on anyone or gain any strength from having them suffer the same indignity. Looking at them would only mirror her own pain back to her. But then the third thought came, and it was less of a thought than a feeling of pure horror at what Jim had just said.
“Right,” Amy said with a smile, “because a bald woman isn’t worth keeping—even if you’ve been married to her for nearly fifty years and she’s the mother of your children. I totally get it. Bald women are worthless and disgusting. Yeah, good call, Jim.”
She held up her hand to stop him from saying one more dumb word, but he said, “I didn’t mean that, Amy. I just meant—”
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, Jim. It’s okay. Nice to meet you, Mark. Welcome to the neighborhood. I gotta go.” She turned around and walked back toward home as quickly as she could with her sore “field dressed” belly, quickly enough to escape before the angry tears came, letters still in hand.
“I really stuck my foot in it, didn’t I,” she could hear Jim say to his new neighbor, and then heard his uncomfortable laugh.
The thing was, she knew Jim had a kind heart and never meant to say anything so stupid. She did. Like him, many people made dumb attempts at humor when they were uncomfortable. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand; she just didn’t want to be around them anymore.
Through the house, she heard the garage door hum as it raised, then Paul’s car pull in and stop and his car door shut. She heard him open the laundry room door and close it behind him. Inhaling deeply, she bent her knees ever so slightly. Her heart raced, and then she broke out in another sweaty hot flash.
He walked in, expressionless as usual, glanced at her on his way to the kitchen, and stopped. She was as transparent as he was opaque. “What’s going on?”
“I’m going to go away for a little while too,” she said simply.
He waited for her to say more, which she usually did, but this time she feared she would say too much, so she remained silent.
“For how long?”
Even though she was clear about all of the reasons she was doing this, she felt a tugging at her heart. “A few weeks, maybe. A couple months. I’m not sure.”
He studied her closely. “Are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t understand.”
All the things she wanted to say were right there, but she couldn’t figure out how to string them together in any way that made sense. Because I found the file and I know how you really feel about me, and even though you feel obligated to stay now, I want more. You should have brought me a giant bouquet of flowers in the hospital after my surgeries, but especially after the first one. It would have made me feel like a woman when I just felt like a bald, sexless potato. You don’t look at me the way you used to in the very beginning. You haven’t for decades and I’m lonely. I’m so unspeakably lonely. There is always some emergency more important than me. I can’t compete with humanity like that. There’s not enough of you for all of us. And I know you know that. I intended to be your wellspring and your oasis forever, but then my well ran dry. And I can’t imagine having sex ever again. I’ve tried and I just can’t imagine it. Because even though I have no idea what another option would look like, I choose not to rebuild my isolated life. I am lonelier with you than I am alone. All of those words were right there, and with every last ounce of her will, Amy successfully stopped them from tumbling out.
Taking a big breath, she decided to tell him only the parts that she knew for certain to be true and was willing to share. “I am going through something. And I have been through something. I don’t even know how to wrap my mind around it. I look at my body in the mirror and I think, I have been through something, and I sob. And I know it’s theoretically over now, but I’m completely overwhelmed by all the healing that still needs to be done. I can’t figure out how I’m ever going to heal from all of this. But I know you can’t help me. You’ve been here for me in very practical ways and I deeply appreciate it. I could not have gotten through this without you. You were absolutely my hero. I just know you can’t help me with the emotional stuff.”
His brow furrowed as he continued to stare at her, and she wondered how aware he was of his own limited capacity when it came to emotions.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to the forests where I spent my summers as a kid.”
“Up in Washington State?”
She nodded. “I just want to be in the forest. I feel like nature is the only thing that might be able to heal me. For months, I kept thinking that if I could just be with the really big trees, I would be okay.”
“You’re leaving me for trees?”
“Yes.”
“You could just come with us and spend time in the forest near Chama.”
She shook her head. “It’s not the same. I want to go home.”
“I thought this was your home.”
I found the papers! she wanted to say. You intended to wreck this home on this very day! How can I pretend it’s my home now? But instead, she said, “I just want to be immersed in the gentlest, softest, kindest forest in the world. I want to visit my favorite tree.”
“You have a favorite tree?”
She nodded.
“And then after that you’ll probably come back?”
Amy nodded because it was easier—not because she really believed she would.
Paul
Paul vaguely remembered a time in college when he used to write song lyrics. Fragments of poetry would drift across his mind the way birds sometimes flew nearby. Life had changed all of that. The world, it seemed, was a chaotic and tragic place full of far too many problems to solve. Still, he tried to solve as many problems as he could each day, and that didn’t leave room for poetry and songs. It demanded a person be as efficient as possible. No wasted time. No wasted words. Now he thought in lists.
When Carly disembarks, put her luggage in the back seat instead of the trunk, so she won’t see the other bags I have packed for her.
Carry her bag for her so that she is less likely to see the small cooler containing sandwiches on the floor of the back seat.
Act normal.
Sitting in the front seat as he waited, he unfolded the map and reviewed the route he would drive. The bus pulled up eight minutes late. Graduates began to stream out of it while the driver pulled bags out from below.
Carly looked tired when she stepped off the bus. She was smiling with her mouth but not her eyes. Paul wished he could hug her and change it back. Even though this moment of graduation was all about letting go so his child could strike out into the world on her own, it felt wrong—not wrong because he was resisting it out of his own attachment, but wrong as if it were being done improperly. Her eyes had changed sometime last winter. He wanted his little girl back—the one with good judgment, the one with the best of intentions, the one with purity of heart and a mind full of idealism.
He stepped out of his car, casually strode over, and stood next to her as she said good-bye to her friends who walked by. She hardly acknowledged him at all. “Ready? Can I take your bag?” He put his arm around her for a sideways hug and gave her shoulder a little squeeze, looking at the boys in the crowd for one that looked guilty or scared when meeting his gaze. Carly had told him two years ago about how a group of boys in the cafeteria had joked that they were all scared of him and none of them would ever ask her on a date or to a dance. At the time, she had found it funny, but she had been his little girl still. “Did you have fun?”
Handing the handle of her duffel bag to him, she shrugged. “Yeah.” It wasn’t very convincing.
Not wanting to create any tension or resistance by asking her questions, he granted her silence as they walked to the car. She stepped into the front seat, and he put her duffel bag in the back seat, as planned
. Then he got in and began to drive, waiting to see how far he could go before she would begin to ask questions.
To his surprise, she took off her coat, wadded it up and leaned it against the passenger window, rested her head on it, and closed her eyes, presumably to sleep but most likely to simply avoid conversation with him. He hoped she would fake it until she actually fell asleep.
As he drove, he glanced sideways at his little girl who was not so little anymore, looking for what had changed and what had stayed the same. Her nose and her lips looked the same to him as when she had been a sleeping baby, only bigger. Her face, though, was painted with makeup, showcasing her maturity and hiding her innocence. He wanted to see her innocence again. Maybe this summer he would. Her long blond hair had darkened over time. Suddenly it struck him as so odd that this young woman in the front seat had once fit in his two hands.
His mind drifted to Amy, wondering whether she had left yet, wondering how far she had driven if she had. He could check his Find My iPhone app if he really wanted to know, but it seemed out of line, a card he would hold until he had no other to play.
* * *
He remembered the night that he decided he would ask Amy for a divorce after Carly graduated. There was a block party. Around thirty neighbors gathered around tables full of food, their plates piled high, swapping compliments about so-and-so’s chicken casserole and so-and-so’s potato salad and so-and-so’s biscuits. Below their feet, a few small children colored the street with sidewalk chalk, while the older ones shot baskets in the Jamesons’ driveway. It was a Norman Rockwell painting, a picture of innocence, a moment reminiscent of another time, a time before meth, a time before human trafficking, a time when child porn was utterly unheard of.
“Hey! Paul!” his neighbor Jim shouted out as he made his way over to him. “Good to see you! How was your day?”
How was your day? It was a perfectly normal question. And yet when Paul thought about it, he did not come up with a perfectly normal answer. He had stopped a man that day—a man who appeared to be a pimp and had drawn a weapon on him. Stopped. That was the language they used when they had to shoot someone. Stopped. And he had forgotten about it until Jim had asked about his day.
On Paul’s third day on the job twenty-five years ago, he and his partner responded to a homicide call in an apartment. Brain tissue had dripped off the ceiling, lung tissue off the wall. A small group of first responders watched TV on the couch while they waited for the report to be finished and for someone from the coroner’s office to come pick up the body. At the time, Paul hadn’t been able to understand how these men could sit there and watch Jeopardy! as if this were nothing. For months, he would have nightmares about that ceiling and that wall.
And now, he could shoot a man and forget about it until someone asked him about his day. How remarkable, really, that someone could adapt to such horrors. The thing was, that to block out the ugliness, a person had to block out the good stuff too. It couldn’t be selective. It was like watching TV and not being able to select the sounds he wanted to hear from the sounds he did not. There was just one volume button. And he had turned the volume on life way down, all the way down to where he rarely heard or felt anything.
There was even more to it, though, and that had something to do with the fact that he could not tell his neighbor about his day. He could not bring that ugliness into this pristine gathering. His neighbors would think he was a monster, killing people and then giving it no thought at all. That had to stay hidden. Washing over him was the sense that he did not belong there, that he was too impure to be there, and it was isolating.
“Pretty good,” he answered, because that was true. He had stopped a man and still had a pretty good day. Until now. Until having it hit him again how different his daily reality was. How ugly it was.
Jim began to yammer on about nothing, while Paul shoveled pork and beans into his mouth and looked over at Amy farther down the street visiting with their elderly neighbor, Mrs. Farman. Amy was all smiles and sunshine. Nothing ugly ever stuck to her. She deserved so much more. It wasn’t too late. She was still pretty. She could find someone new, someone who didn’t shoot people and forget about it, someone who could love her the way she deserved to be loved, with the volume turned all the way up.
* * *
Since he didn’t know what to wish for now, and since he had seldom seen the effects of wishing, he resolved to simply wait.
He made two left turns that were not part of the drive home, but Carly did not stir. It appeared she had indeed fallen asleep while faking it. For nearly two hours, he drove in peace.
The landscape around him took him back to when he drove this very route twenty-seven years ago, from Keyes back to Oklahoma City, after introducing Amy to his parents.
* * *
“So, how did you two meet?” asked Paul’s mother, the first and only time he brought Amy home to meet his parents. “I mean, I know you met at school, but Paul didn’t share the details.”
Paul was the middle of three boys. John, the youngest, sat on the other side of him. Gary, the oldest, was grown and gone. His mother, it seemed to him, was excited to have another woman in the house to talk to.
Paul’s dad had never been much of a source of conversation, all but ignoring Amy despite the fact that he was sitting directly across the table from her. Paul had wished his dad would try just this once to be nice. Instead, he served himself up a portion of mashed potatoes, giving it his full attention. On the wall behind him hung various honors from the time he had served in Vietnam, among them a Purple Heart.
Amy’s hand trembled a bit as she served herself, revealing her nervousness. “Well,” she began, “he used to play guitar outside of the art building, where I’d hear him while I was painting.”
“Guitar,” snorted his dad with some level of disgust. Turning to Paul, he said, “Just sitting on the grass playing guitar, huh? That sounds like something a hippie would do.” He stared at Paul aggressively, but Paul didn’t back down or fight, only met his gaze with a neutral expression. To his left, John hadn’t looked up from his plate since he had sat down.
“Were you doing more than just sitting on the grass, son? Were you smoking it, too?”
“No, sir,” Paul said, and although his expression was remarkably blank, inside he was feeling it all—anger, embarrassment, regret, sadness … and weighing the choice about whether to stay and endure his father or leave and hurt his mother.
“Here’s an idea: Why don’t you do something useful with your time, like work a little more.”
“Yes, sir,” Paul replied again, his obedience impeccable.
Paul looked over at his mother, again weighing his choice. She was staring at her plate as well. For the rest of the dinner, no one said a word and no one looked up. Paul didn’t need to. Looking at his food, he could still see his family through Amy’s eyes—his father’s anger, his brother waiting for a safe moment to escape, his mother’s noxious blend of terror and grief—grief for the family dinner experience she had thought she was going to have and had worked so hard for. With his peripheral vision, he thought he saw tears well up in her eyes from time to time. What a disaster. How he wished he had never brought Amy here.
Amy and Paul helped clear the plates when it was over, then thanked and complimented his mother in the kitchen. Paul made an excuse for them needing to get back and retrieved their coats from a bedroom, leaving Amy alone with his mother in the kitchen.
With coats in hand, he approached the kitchen but stopped when heard his mom whispering.
“I’m sorry. He really is a good man. He doesn’t always act like it, but deep down he is. Please don’t dismiss Paul because of this.”
Horrified, Paul walked around the corner to stop any more damage from happening, but as he did, he heard Amy’s reply.
“I love Paul.” Paul’s heart swelled. It was the first time he had heard her say so.
He took her hand, and together they walked into the family
room, where his father rose to shake their hands.
“Thank you, sir,” Paul said.
Amy was gracious enough to say, “It was a pleasure to meet you.”
But his father grunted again and said, “I’ll bet.” Unbelievable.
Paul marveled at how he and his father could have such similar features—such a strong resemblance in the most basic ways—and yet be completely opposite in all the ways that mattered.
They shook John’s hand too, and what Paul remembered seeing in his brother’s eyes was a desperate imploring to take him with them. Paul wanted to, but he could not figure out how. There was no place for John in the tiny dorm room Paul shared with a roommate.
Once they were safely in Paul’s car and on their way, Paul said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea. I guess I just had this fantasy that for one night of my whole life, my dad could be normal and I could bring my girl home like everyone else. I will never ask you to go there again.”
“It’s okay,” Amy said, but he could see her relief.
Silence engulfed them for several miles, and then Paul said, “So, you love me, huh?”
He glanced at the road and back to Amy twice before she finally said, “Yeah, I love you.”
“Even after all that,” he said, marveling.
“Even after all that.”
He pulled over to the shoulder of the road, leaned over, and kissed her long and tenderly. He ran his hand down the side of her face, gently brushing her hair, looked her deep in the eyes, and said, “I love you, too.” Then, as he pulled the old car back onto the road and hit the gas, he added, “I’m going to marry you, Amy Jenkins.”
“How do you know?” she sassed back to lighten the mood. “You haven’t even asked me yet. You don’t know what I’ll say.”
For a split second, he looked concerned before he glanced over and saw her smile. “I think I do know,” he said, taking them down the road further and further from his roots and his fears and his inadequacies, taking them down the road toward the future they’d build together.