Every Time You Go Away

by Beth Harbison

  But I let go and we walked down to the shoreline side by side, our arms bumping now and then as we traversed the hot sand. I noticed he stepped over the end of the first wave when we got there, just as he used to jump it as a child. Then we stood together, feeling the pull of the water rushing over our feet and burying our heels deep among the sand crabs.

  “So you want to keep the house, huh?” I asked. We were both looking straight ahead, out over the water, directly toward Spain, thousands of miles away.

  “Yeah. I do. I didn’t think we should at first, but now I can’t even imagine what I was thinking.”

  I glanced at him, but he was looking straight ahead, his jaw tight. “I think I know what you mean.”

  That’s when he looked at me, and I could see tears in his eyes. “I miss him,” he said, and his voice broke a little.

  I put my arm around his waist, skinny and bony and still so boyish even as he careened toward manhood. “I do too,” I said, and the tears rolled right down my cheeks, there was no stopping them.

  We stood in silence for a few minutes, with all the chaos and laughter ringing around us.

  Then Jamie turned to me and said, “I’m really sorry I didn’t do more to help.”

  “Oh, honey, that’s okay. I’m just so glad you came and that you’ve been having a good time. I knew it wouldn’t be a lot of fun for you to come paint and vacuum and watch Cranky Dave fix the pipes, but I sure do appreciate your coming.”

  “I don’t mean that,” he said. “Well, not just that. I should have helped more with the house and I shouldn’t have been such a brat about not wanting to come, but what I mean is that I’m sorry I didn’t help more when Dad died.”

  I looked at him and shaded my eyes from the sun. “What do you mean? You were just a kid.”

  He gave a half shrug. “Maybe, but I knew you were sad. I could hear you crying at night.”

  I’d tried so hard to keep that from him. Not that he shouldn’t have known I was sad, but I’d never wanted him to have any idea just how broken I felt. I was supposed to be the grown-up. I was supposed to be the strong one, the protector, all of that. It felt horrible to know that this poor child had been lying in his room, alone and scared himself, hearing his one remaining parent absolutely losing her shit.

  It was years late, but I decided to address this with absolute honesty. “I’m the one who should be apologizing to you.”

  He looked genuinely surprised. “Why?”

  “Because I let you down that way. I wasn’t nearly as strong as I should have been. As I wanted to be. I never wanted you to hear that or to worry about me. You were a child, you needed a guidepost, and I was all over the place. And ever since then I haven’t been able to get back on track with you. I’m embarrassed for not being more parental.”

  “Mom—”

  “No, I mean it. I should have made better dinners, had more tolerance for the noise you and your friends made, taken you more places, maybe taken you to Disney World.”

  “We did go to Disney World.”

  “I should have taken you again.” I sighed. “I feel like I fell really short right when you needed me most. And even while I felt that way, even while I was struggling with my own demons and failing you, I couldn’t get myself together enough to do what I knew I should be doing. Parenting. Being a good parent, especially since I was the only one you had.”

  He shook his head. “That’s crazy, you’ve been a great mom.”

  A moment passed. “I don’t know about that, but I promise you this: I have done the absolute best I could with what I had at the time. And I promise to always do my best by you.”

  He put his arm around me this time and hugged, hard. “You’ve been a great mom.”

  I hugged him back, swallowing the sobs that threatened. “I love you, baby.”

  “I love you too.”

  At that moment, my heart felt more full than I could ever, in my life, remember it feeling. Everything was as it was supposed to be, and I knew, for once, without a doubt, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing.

  “So,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, since I sensed that Jamie didn’t know where to go with it either. “What’s going on with you and Kelsey?”

  His face colored immediately. “What? Nothing. We’re just friends.”

  “Interesting, I didn’t ask if there was something more than friendship there. I just asked what was going on. I could have been talking about work, for all you know.”

  “You weren’t talking about work.”

  “I was!”

  Somehow his face grew an even deeper shade of red. “Work is great. Well, maybe not great, it’s work, but work is work. You know. Like, we both like it okay, I guess.”

  It was a lot of words for one simple denial.

  I smiled privately. “Almost no one loves their first job.”

  “But it’s cool, you know. I like having money.”

  I nodded. “That’s one of the big bonuses. You’re making money and you don’t have to spend it on rent or mortgage or utilities or anything. You can just stuff your face and buy video games and go on dates…”

  He shifted his gaze toward me. “I know what you’re doing.”

  “Me?” I asked innocently.

  “Yes, I know what you’re implying. Were you and Kristin in on this together, trying to hook us up or something?”

  “There you go again, talking about you and Kelsey when I’m talking to you about regular life stuff.” I shook my head. “It’s almost as if you have Kelsey on the brain.”

  He rolled his eyes, then said, “I kind of do.”

  I had to hold in a shout of laughter. I knew it! I knew he had a thing for her. They were such a cute couple. “Yeah, well, I’ve got a secret for you,” I told him.

  “What’s that?” he asked with exaggerated patience.

  “I think she has a thing for you too.”

  He couldn’t help it, his face lit up. “Do you really?”

  I nodded. “I really do.”

  We turned and walked back to our chairs together.

  “Don’t say anything to her,” he said. “I mean it.”

  “I won’t.” I made the sign of locking my lips and throwing away the key.

  “So do you think we can stay at the house?” he asked, clearly trying to hide the eagerness from his voice. “At least for this summer, if not forever?”

  I thought about that and gave a nod. “I think we can at least stay for this summer,” I said. “If not forever.”

  As we came back onto the dry sand, a little boy ran by with a kite. A little boy who looked like a young Jamie, or maybe a young Ben.

  I froze in my spot. Was this Ben? Was this the child I’d seen when I first arrived?

  “Oh, man, I used to love doing that,” Jamie said, smiling.

  “Doing what?”

  He gestured. “Flying a kite on the beach. The wind is so strong it just, whoop, pulls it right up into the air.”

  “So you can see him?”

  He looked at me like he didn’t understand. “See who?”

  “That child with the kite.”

  “Yeah? What the heck, Mom? Of course I can see him.”

  Right. What the heck, Mom? I sounded like a crazy person.

  “It’s not me,” a voice said in my ear. The wind? Maybe. But I didn’t think so.

  “Let’s get back to the house,” Jamie said, patting my shoulder. “I think the heat is getting to you.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Willa

  I’d seen it coming and yet I hadn’t. Jamie’s desire to keep the house.

  I think I had come here looking to find my own peace with the place and, in so doing, my peace with the past, and at first I had believed his protestations about not wanting to come. So I’d come to reconcile things myself.

  And that was what had happened. Because no matter what road it took now, no matter what happened, now that I’d seen Be
n again I knew that time would never spin backward and give me back what it had taken.

  Even in seeing Ben, as I undoubtedly had, something had been lacking. The completeness of touch. His eyes had looked at me, his voice had been the same, but there was a certain warmth missing. The shared experience was gone, because, of course, he was gone, and even if he could “come back” for moments at a time, he wasn’t back.

  And if he were able to spend the rest of my lifetime doing that, skirting the edges of my existence with a quip here and there, it would do nothing but keep me only half alive, which was the problem when he showed up.

  So was it a waste?

  Certainly not. Because the fact was, I was leading a half life in his absence, and in so doing, I was being half a parent to Jamie. (If you’re keeping track of the math, that left him down one and a half parents.) That was not fair to him. He had never asked for that deal and he definitely never deserved it.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with the house in the cocoon of having decided not to sell it. I couldn’t just hold on to it for our convenience. I’d have to keep it from being the money pit it had become, in our absence, over the past three years.

  Weekly rentals in summer were profitable. Year-round tenants would pay the mortgage. Either way, I’d be covered. These thoughts made me relax. I’d be covered. And the property would increase in value.

  But this year? This summer?

  This summer was for Jamie and Kelsey to enjoy. They could stay here, almost the age that Ben and I had been once upon a time, and they could springboard their futures from here, just as we had.

  * * *

  The house had a different temperature when I was in it alone. I was here alone at first, of course, when I arrived to start all this. I was here with Dolly and the empty house. But I felt more haunted then than I did when Ben had appeared.

  I had come into this old house with a bag full of chips slung onto my shoulder. My fear followed me like a thick cloud. Self-doubt niggled in my sternum, threatening to take me down the second I believed in it. Memories clashed silently and noisily in every room, and I insisted on seeing through them, ignoring them, because I couldn’t watch them.

  I came in here with a dry mouth tasting of blood and bile and dread, looking through tear-braced eyes at an old abandoned set of my life, smelling the death that didn’t actually hang in the mildewed air, hearing a silence that seemed to beat down the remembered songs that used to bounce out of speakers and through the halls, feeling my own hand empty without Ben’s hand in it, with him beside me.

  And now I was free. Free from that. Ben was gone, but he was here. The house was just a house, lit warmly by the lights strung by my best friend on the potted palm tree in the corner. It smelled like the coffee my best friend’s daughter had happily made earlier. I knew my son’s shoes were in the front hall, sandy and untied.

  Ben was gone, but he was here.

  He was in the nails hammered into the walls, in the furniture moved once and only once through these doors. In the stool that had a broken rung from a moment that had been positively slapstick at the time, but which made my cheeks sting now. He was here in the way this house felt lived in, felt laughed in, felt loved in, felt slept in. He had died here. Jamie was right. It was terrible that he’d died here. But it made a little bit of sense. If he’d died at our home in Potomac, how would I have dealt with that?

  He died here, where we came to do things once or rarely. Life was never like the rest of life here. Life stopped here.

  And it had.

  It had for Ben. But it didn’t have to for us.

  It didn’t have to for Jamie, for me, for Kristin, Kelsey, and Phillip, for anyone else who wanted to come here and make the air buzz again like it was supposed to. This house was supposed to live in settled dust, and then erupt like a spike of laughter in the summer. I wasn’t supposed to give it up to someone else, abandon it like it scared me.

  Would I give up a dog who had been there when my husband died, just because he’d been the last to see him? Or would I grab him, scratch his ears, and let him know how glad I was he’d been here?

  I would give him a bath and throw a damn bandanna on him. That’s what I’d do.

  I was frozen in the center of the house. It might very well have been the dead center of the house. My hip leaned against the table. The washer and dryer sprayed and tumbled in the laundry room off to my left, sounding like domestic life. The house was clean and empty enough.

  With a lurch of my heart, I imagined how frantic I would feel to get it back if I saw it empty of everything. How too-late it would feel.

  My flesh buzzed, not quite cold, just somewhat electrified, as I looked around me.

  I stared at the center of the living room, and then, as though we’d been in the middle of a conversation and I’d looked away, I shifted my eyes directly to his own, where he stood now by the sink.

  “Willa.”

  He sounded louder, more resonant, than he ever had before. Like he was really in the room. I would have said he sounded “here,” but now I knew that I would have been wrong.

  His voice had a different weight. It was like it was real.

  I started to say his name and then couldn’t. I was bent over suddenly in a sob. One that took me over like a punch in the gut. The kind that felt like someone was reaching in with pliers and yanking out my deepest, molten hot emotions and making me feel them as they left me.

  I heard his footsteps, felt them on the wood floor as he came over to me. I gasped for breath as his hand reached the small of my back and then didn’t consider before turning and falling into him. I didn’t stop to wonder if he was solid enough to hold me, or real enough, I just believed in him and fell hard, so hard I would have fallen on my face if he wasn’t there.

  He was there.

  I breathed in his scent, which had been more missing than I’d realized before. I grabbed the fabric of his shirt with both hands like I used to when I was mad at him, but wrong, and half apologizing, half angry. I sobbed so hard into his chest that I couldn’t breathe. His shirt went damp with my tears. My face was warped, all my veins surely popping, every wrinkle being put into use, my teeth bared as if I were a vicious animal instead of a weak, grieving woman. The second my knees started to turn to boiling mercury, he held me up. Actually held me up.

  So I spun. I fell. I fell so hard into my misery that I stopped thinking about the kids coming home in a few hours. I stopped thinking about the house and the plumber and how ugly I’d be when I saw my reflection again. I stopped thinking about even stopping my tears. I lived in an infinite moment then. And I believe that when I fell into that, that’s what caused whatever broke.

  He stepped me back from the kitchen. Piano music started from the speakers built into the shelves by the TV.

  “Endless Time” by Roberto Cacciapaglia. He’d heard it somewhere, the year before he died, and we’d listened to it and danced to it in this very kitchen. Everyone had gone to bed, and we were the only ones left awake on the last night of our summer vacation. I’d loaded the last dishwasher load. He had just come in from cleaning the grill. Dolly had run up to sleep in Jamie’s room. Phillip and Kristin had gone for a walk and had since returned and retired. We’d been up late that night. I’d showered, my hair was brushed back, and I was warm and clean in my nightgown. He’d come in and showered with me, putting a hand to my lips and telling me they’d gone on a walk, but the kids were still upstairs.

  We’d made out like characters in the rain under that showerhead. The shower smelled like Irish Spring, which we only used at the beach house. His eyelashes stuck together and got spiky from the water. He put a hand on the side of my face, and because of the way he looked at me, I felt like a supermodel in a music video.

  I had told him this, and he had laughed and said with a shrug, “They were never as hot as you.”

  This all came rushing back to me so fast that my tears choked me. I breathed in deeply once I caught my breath and look
ed up at him. He was there, still there. He looked at me like he knew what moment I was reliving.

  That night, we had danced in the living room, all the lights out except the warm glow of the night-lights.

  He kissed me on the cheek, that sort of kiss that almost feels deeper than one on the lips, and brought me in close, changed our position, moved my arms from his chest to his neck. I leaned on him and felt his hands once again, blissfully on my waist.

  In that moment, just like I never did with him, really, I didn’t worry about my waist, about anything about me. It was only ever about us, about then, about something deeper and more entwined.

  He spun me around and I remembered something else.

  I kept my eyes shut but suddenly so vividly remembered a night at Pretty Mama’s, out on the sandy patio. The DJ outside had been playing “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, and Kristin and Phillip had teased us for dancing like we were at prom. But we were in a moment.

  A moment that was apparently being stored for now.

  He had twisted me around so slowly in the sand, my feet bare—I could feel my bare feet on the sand, the fabric of my skirt around my ankles, even the sunburn on my shoulders—and I had breathed him in, tequila-drunk and happy-drunk.

  We revolved again and my stomach felt wrought and sore and … relieved. Jamie. When Jamie was born. When Jamie was born and we first brought him home, to the other house, and we stood in his room listening to his lullaby CD in the corner, lit by the pale lavender light that stood near the speaker, and our son—our tiny, fragile son who was so quickly about to grow into a young man—slept in the crib, unaware of his parents standing there watching him. I had had my cheek on Ben’s chest, and we’d just stood there, holding each other, my stomach still swollen, annoyingly flabby, my back aching, my thighs like quivering Jell-O, and watched him, just watched him breathe.

  We spun once more.

  Again, and we were here, right here again, to the night we spent here right after we had bought it. It was empty and smelled like cobwebs and dust and it was ours. So mutually and heavenly ours.

  The moment of now, of Jamie and Kelsey at work, Kristin out, and me alone, that moment came back now like waking from a dream.