by Deborah Reed
“What if she goes into labor?”
“I’ll deal with that, Annie. It’s none of your business.”
“You didn’t think? It’s none of my business? Were you always this stupid, Owen? Were you always so dumb and callous, or did you turn into this toward the end?” Her voice crawls up her throat as she tries not to cry. “Because I have to say I’m sick at the thought that I ever loved you. I can’t believe I let you touch me.”
The hurt is clear in his face.
“You’re not thinking straight. I don’t blame you. I guarantee when you calm down you’re going to see things differently.”
“You don’t even know the half of it. It has taken me six fucking months to even begin calming down.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was pregnant.”
“What?”
“I was pregnant when you left me.”
Owen looks around the room as if for a baby. “What?”
She holds her hand up to say, “Enough.”
Owen drops back into the chair and covers his face, and if there’s anything that ought to make him sorry for the rest of his life this ought to do it.
“Jesus, Annie.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Did you have an abortion?”
Annie laughs. “I was coming home from the store with the pregnancy test while you were driving off into the sunset with your girlfriend.”
He drops his hands from his face.
“You need to leave,” she says.
“What happened?” He pleads with his eyes. Then he coughs so hard she can’t tell if this is what causes his eyes to run, but she doesn’t care because the sound of the phlegm in his throat brings her to within an inch of hating him.
“Fine. If you won’t leave, then I will.” She throws on her jacket and boots and looks for her purse while Owen follows her around the house. “Please,” he says. “I’m begging you to stay and talk to me.” His tone grows more maniacal the longer he speaks. He’s like a crazy boyfriend heading her off in every room. “Annie. No. Please. Tell me what happened to the baby.” He’s pretending to stay calm, but it’s clear he wants to grab her by the throat. She holds her keys between her fingers in her pocket. She will claw his eyes out before he knows what hit him.
“If you don’t get out of my way that little girl of yours is going to grow up with a blind daddy.”
He steps aside.
She plucks her purse off the coat rack. “Good choice. Now call your wife and tell her you’re on your way.”
“I can’t. Even if I wanted to. I can’t drive a Miata in snow.”
She steps outside to the wind sweeping waves of white into the air as far as she can see. The snow has blotted out the entire world beyond her driveway.
“Fine. Fine! But just how am I supposed to get back home?” Owen says, and for the first time in months Annie hears the makings of a song.
She slams the door but doesn’t move. She knows if she turns around and goes back inside she will find him right where she left him. If she goes back in she might not say the thing she needs to say.
But there is nowhere to go and she doesn’t want to stare any longer at the lump beneath the willow tree. She turns and goes inside. Finding him exactly as she knew she would somehow robs her of her anger. “Sit down,” she says.
He doesn’t move.
“Go ahead,” she says. “Don’t look at me like that.”
He moves to the sofa and reluctantly takes a seat.
She’s in control now. He’s no longer calling the shots. He doesn’t get to decide who goes and who gets left behind, whose heart gets broken and who carries on, who lives alone, becomes a parent, or never gets the chance.
“Go back to her, Owen.”
“Annie.”
“You made the choice once, you can make it again.”
“I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“You’re not thinking straight now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can love two people at the same time.”
“But I don’t,” he says, and she sees a flicker of doubt in his eyes. He pulls his earlobe then quickly drops his hand.
She sits in the chair across from him. The fire has died out. Her heavy breathing is the only sound in the room. She drops her hand down the side of the chair and loosely plucks the low E on her guitar. “I read somewhere that a lot of men panic just before their babies are born. Some even kill their wives.”
“Good God, Annie.”
“It’s true.”
“I’m not panicking.”
“You should be. You’re here with all this snow between you and your wife. Your child could come at any moment.”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. We used to joke that we’d get married if we ever had the time. But it doesn’t take time, does it? You proved that with Tess.”
“That was different.”
“You’re right. But not in the way you think.”
He turns his head to the side, and then he looks at the floor and bobs his heel nervously. “Do you remember the time we snuck naked into Cypress Springs?” he says.
Annie lifts her chin to think.
“The park ranger came and threw us out.”
“Sort of.”
“We were kissing in the water. Your legs were wrapped around my waist. You told me you loved me. I don’t know why it had such an effect on me. You were just being playful, but I swear I’ve never felt more love for anyone in my life than I felt for you in that moment. Not before and not since.”
Annie nods at the floor.
“It was like a bullet to the heart. Powerful as that. I started to tell you, but then the ranger came and we had to go. After that it seemed too contrived or something. I don’t know. Misplaced. Too out of context to bring it up and have it matter the way it should.”
Annie shakes her head. “Sorry. I don’t really remember.”
“We could see clear past our feet to the limestone.”
“I lost the baby three days after you left.”
The red in his face drains away. He stands and paces a wide circle into the kitchen and back with a hand rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, Annie. Jesus Christ. If I could just say more than that. It’s not enough. That was my fault just as sure as I’m standing here.”
“I thought so, too.”
He kicks one of his own ornaments across the floor.
“Then again, those things happen,” she says. “We have no way of knowing either way.”
“We can change what’s about to happen here, Annie. Here and now. We can decide what the future looks like. Don’t send me away.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“What have you got to be sorry for?”
“For letting you in. I’m sorry for opening the gate. And I’m sorry to your wife.”
This seems to hit Owen harder than anything else she’s said here today.
“Go back, Owen.”
“Annie.” His chin quivers.
She can still smell him on her hands. “It’s your second chance,” she says, recalling in detail the morning at the spring.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The summer before Joshua left, he and Annie discovered places along country roads they’d never been down before. Wentzville Springs had more than anywhere else. One time they wandered into a small museum where they couldn’t take their eyes off an old cornflower-blue dress that hung next to a washboard once used to scrub it clean. There was nothing else on that corner of the wall, and the glaring omission, it seemed, was the woman, gone from the dress for a hundred years. Joshua said it was one of the saddest sights he’d ever seen. Annie thought so, too. Before they left he bought her a postcard with the photo of the dress on it. He said she could write something on the back and send it to him in the fall, or she could just keep it, to remember him by, to reme
mber this day. He was always giving her things to remember him by, as if she would ever forget.
Another time they came across a fish house along the St. John’s River where they sat and watched gators slip from the banks into the water like giant duffels of lead. Snakes hung from trees in view of the outdoor patio. Everything smelled like fried catfish, and they gorged on cornbread with butter and honey and had their Cokes refilled every time the waitress rushed by.
It was on the way home, with their bellies full of cornbread, that they had their first real fight.
‘“Lovely Rita’ was not on the Sergeant Pepper’s album,” Annie said.
“Yes it was.”
“It was not. How would you know?”
“I’m not stupid,” he said.
“No one said that.”
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know things like that,” he said.
“Oh, so I’m the stupid one?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“And you’re the rocket scientist?” Annie said.
“I didn’t say that!”
“You didn’t have to. You’re the one going off to a fancy private school and then college, not me, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who’s going to end up where ten years from now.”
Joshua stopped the car.
She felt miserable and childish and unbearably sad. He held her face in his hands and said, “Promise me you’ll write.”
“I promise,” she said, though she wasn’t sure which he meant, write to him or keep writing music.
He kissed her long and hard. He stopped long enough to say, “I love every inch of you, Annie Walsh.” And she smiled and said, “You would know,” and kissed his neck because that got him every time.
The last day of their summer, the last moment before he drove off, Calder came outside to say good-bye. The two of them hugged one another and got teary-eyed, and Annie had to turn away and wipe her already soaking face. “So we’ll see you at Thanksgiving, right?” Calder said.
Joshua nodded.
Calder touched Annie’s arm and went inside. It was late and way past the time Joshua told his aunt he’d be getting on the road.
They couldn’t keep from holding hands. Every time they let go they found themselves attached seconds later.
Joshua pulled her against him, and she could feel him shaking with tears. She was doing the same, and they held on like that until they settled down and he whispered in her ear, “I love you, Annie Walsh. I know we’re young and people say these things never work out, but I swear I’ll never love anyone the way I love you. Remember that when you’re closed up in your bedroom writing sad songs.”
Then he held her away from him and stared into her eyes. She didn’t wonder if anyone else could ever love her the way he did. What she wondered was whether anyone else would ever look at her the way he looked at her, like the world mattered just because she was in it.
When he drove away the pain in her chest nearly doubled her over. But even when his letters came and she read them till she had them memorized and she’d sit in class and stare out the window dizzily rereading them inside her head to the point that she was failing that first term, even then she knew the seams that had held them together would slowly come apart.
Thanksgiving came, and they rushed into each other’s arms in the driveway, but the feel of him was different. He was mannerly and quiet and she couldn’t imagine what his days were like, but every now and then she got a glimpse that seemed to embarrass him. He’d say something about having been in the middle of studying for a test on the classics when so-and-so wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved the Greeks, and then he’d look over and see the glazed look in her eyes and fall silent.
Christmas was more of the same. Their letters began to sound like they were meant for someone else. His aunt had gotten a promotion, which was helping with the expenses at school, and he’d held on to straight A’s the entire term and was so excited to see where all this was going to lead because already he was thinking he’d become an architect, and what did she think of that? She’d missed school again, she told him, because she couldn’t stand to get out of bed to go sit in a classroom that bored her to tears, but in the meantime she’d written another song that she was fairly happy with and yes, it was sad just like all the others.
They officially ended it, oddly, in spring when orange blossoms drenched the air and a drought had kept away the mosquitoes so that if they’d wanted to, they could’ve spent hours alone in the woods. But the end was like a creature growing day by day, inevitably coming into its size. A part of Annie was glad to be rid of it, to no longer need to live with the anticipation, the doom. She was sure he was thinking the same thing though he never said so and neither did she.
“Should we keep in touch?” he asked.
“Don’t you think that’ll just make it harder?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
Several short letters were exchanged, and then they finally lost touch for good. The last time she ever saw him was over a decade later in, of all places, Lukeman’s Grocery.
It was fall, and the weather had turned cool and clear and everyone seemed to have an extra bounce to his step.
And then Annie read in the paper that Mr. Lukeman had hung himself, and the blue sky took on a deep, faraway melancholy that prompted her to phone her mother without thinking. His wife had discovered him with another man, her mother explained, and shortly after confronting him she found him hanging in the garage. “Why,” her mother posed, “would anyone choose to take his own life?”
Annie drove the long way round past Lakewood Elementary wondering if Mrs. Brinkman was still alive, past Peterson’s Peach grove that was now called Gruger’s and the stretch of land that used to be a cattle field but was now full of concrete culs de sac. She barely recognized the acres that were once filled with piney woods and the scrub that had formed a cove she once sat in. Once lay in. It was now an apartment complex, and in front of that, a strip mall with a dry cleaner, pizza parlor, and a pet store. Lukeman’s Grocery, however, looked exactly the same with its green awning and red faux brick and tar-filled railroad ties to park against.
Annie wore a jean jacket and her favorite silk scarf that shimmered the color of lapis in the sun. She wandered inside to the smell of cinnamon sticks on the counter and green produce in wooden barrels straight ahead. They still carried Tab in the cooler and Polaroid film on the wall behind the register.
She heard his voice immediately and thought she must be imagining it. She dipped her head around the aisle and heard it again. “I didn’t even know they still made Quisp cereal.”
He was a grown man of twenty-seven and sharply dressed, and he would have taken her breath away if it weren’t for the fact that he was holding the hand of a woman who looked, she had to admit, a little like Annie.
He turned in Annie’s direction, and she walked right up and said, “You were right. ‘Lovely Rita’ was on the Sergeant Pepper’s album.”
Joshua let go of the woman’s hand and his mouth fell open. The woman smiled nervously between them.
He wrapped his arms around Annie and it felt like no time at all had gone by since they’d stood in her driveway, twelve years before. “How are you?” he said, letting go, his eyes searching her face and hair as if to make sure it was really her. “You look great,” he said. The woman next to him gently took his hand back and he turned to her. “This is Annie Walsh, Melinda. Annie, this is Melinda, my fiancée.”
She didn’t know why she hadn’t expected this. People go on with their lives. She’d gone on with hers, if one called a series of dead-end relationships moving on. She looked at Melinda’s ring. A gold band with a cluster of diamonds. Annie was sure Melinda had picked it out herself. Annie would’ve chosen something simpler. A solitaire set in white gold.
“Congratulations,” she said with her best smile. “When’s the big date?”
“Sometime mid-December. We still have to pick the day. Joshua loves that time of year around here.”
Joshua quickly looked away, and Annie felt the blood pool in her face.
“I know what you mean. The light is really great, isn’t it?” she said.
He took a deep breath. “We’re on our way to see my mother. My father passed away a few years back, did you know?”
She’d known how he’d felt about his father. “I heard. I’m sorry,” she said. It was an awkward condolence. But maybe his feelings had changed for his father over the years. She had no way of knowing. She wanted to say that they were both fatherless now, but it sounded stupid and cruel, even inside her own head.
“Why don’t you two catch up?” Melinda said. “I need to grab a few things.”
They were alone again in the produce aisle.
“I’ve settled back in Tampa, for now,” he said.
“Nice.”
“I travel quite a bit for work, though.”
“Me too,” she said with a smile.
“Still singing.”
“Still singing. Still writing sad songs.” She didn’t tell him that she still wrote them with the same silver pen he’d given her years ago. She could practically see the memories spinning in his head the way he searched her face. “I’m playing a lot of mid-size venues,” she said. “Things have really taken off, just lately, in fact. I’m booked a lot up in Gainesville and Athens. College towns, you know.”
“I saw you play once,” he blurted.
“What? Where? When?”
“At The Grinder in Tampa a couple of years back.”
“You’re kidding!”
“You were amazing.”
“Why didn’t you come up to me?”
He looked at the lettuce. “You were there with someone. You seemed happy. I didn’t want to interfere.”
For the life of her she couldn’t remember who she was even dating two years ago the night she played The Grinder.
Melinda was pretending to search for crackers on a shelf. Her back was turned, and Annie reached for Joshua’s hand and he squeezed hers in return. “Joshua.”
“She’s a great woman, Annie.”
“I’m happy for you.”