The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  “Tiramisu,” Ryan told the waiter. “And an espresso, please.”

  “Good luck sleeping,” his wife said, and she was right about that, but by now he didn’t care.

  When his dessert came, he offered her a bite of it, and she said no thank you. She watched him eat. She said, “Men can do that. Pretend that life doesn’t change entirely once you have a child. They’re not on the front lines. In the trenches.”

  “Right.” He saw no point in arguing with her when she got like this. It wasn’t even an argument.

  “I don’t forget about her for a minute. I can’t. It’s almost like I’m still pregnant, when everything I did or ate or even thought affected her. Fed straight into her.”

  Ryan reached across the table and took one of her hands in his. “I’m a little worried about you.”

  She shrugged. “Well, maybe you should be.” Her hand stayed inert, neither drawing back nor squeezing his.

  He paid the check and they retrieved their coats and he said he would go get the car and come back to pick her up so she wouldn’t have to go so far in the cold. In truth, he wanted to get away from her for even the ten minutes it might take him to walk to the car. Alone time.

  For the first time, he found himself wondering if his wife had some kind of mommy depression, the kind you read about. More and more often there had been scenes like this one, when she seemed determined to take no delight in their child, no delight in their present or in their future.

  And that wasn’t like her. She was as levelheaded and focused as any woman he knew. She’d wanted to be married (to someone, presumably to him), she’d wanted a child, children, she would stay at home for three years and then reattack the job market. Now it seemed that none of that was worthwhile.

  He would talk to her about seeing her doctor, getting a prescription. Lots of people took things nowadays. Half his office was probably on Prozac.

  It wasn’t true, as she’d accused him, that he was lighthearted about having a child, or that he separated easily from his responsibilities. The terrible weight of loving his daughter was with him always.

  The car was up another block and down a side street. This block of north Clark was home to any number of restaurants, their windows allowing views of warm light and of people taking pleasure in each other, in the food and sparkling glassware before them, so that on this block, at least, you could believe the whole world was a place of elegance, abundance, and good cheer. He was passing by one of these, its windows outlined in small white electric lights, its tables blooming with arrangements of white flowers, when he saw Janine Pasqua Burnham sitting at a table next to the glass.

  He kept walking, then once he was out of her view he looked back to see who sat across the table from her. A man, Ryan couldn’t make out his face, only a general impression of his dark shirt, casual, undressy. He took two steps past the restaurant’s door, then turned around and went inside.

  A host stood at the entry, checking off names; the restaurant was busy and even this late at night people were waiting in the bar to be seated. Ryan walked past them, not wanting to explain himself, turned a corner and went up to Janine’s table. Her back was to him; the man saw him coming and narrowed his eyes, a question, an alarm. “Hi,” Ryan said to him, then turned to her. “Hello, Janine.”

  It jolted her, he saw it in her face; the jig was up. Then something careful and amused took its place. “Hello, glad to see you’re back on your feet.”

  To the man Ryan said, “Beg your pardon. Just saying hello. Ryan Erickson.” He held out his hand.

  “John Delgado.” Not her husband, then. Or at least, not Burnham.

  They shook. To Janine, Ryan said, “I just wanted to thank you again.” She wore a black turtleneck, a necklace of big silver chunks and matching earrings. Her old style, translated into a more expensive key. They must just have arrived; they had drinks in front of them but no food. To Delgado he said, “I was running and I wiped out on the street. The lady was kind enough to help me up and clean me off.”

  Janine said, “I’m good about things like that.”

  Delgado looked at her, then at Ryan, trying to get a read on them. “Care to join us?” he said, not meaning it. Either he wasn’t in a good mood tonight, or he was never in a good mood. He was one of those men so determinedly bald, it was hard to imagine them ever having hair.

  “Thanks, no. Pleasure to see you again. Nice meeting you, John.”

  “Watch your step out there,” Janine said, her game face still on.

  He nodded and went back out through the crowded bar and outside. He reached his car and drove around an extra block so he could pass the restaurant again. They sat as before, and he thought he saw Janine turn her face toward the dark street, scanning it.

  He pulled up to the curb at the Italian restaurant. His wife emerged and made her careful, teetering way across the sidewalk. When he stepped out to open the car door for her, she waved him away. “I got it.”

  That night he had trouble sleeping, which his wife said was what you could expect if you drank espresso at that hour.

  A week later, he found a J. Burnham in the phone book. He looked up the address, one of those far-north enclaves, where town-house and condo developments had been constructed around leafy squares. When he called the number he got an answering machine—her voice—and hung up without leaving a message. Then, fed up with himself, he called back. “Hi Janine, Ryan Erickson. I guess we could wait and run into each other a third time, but I hope you’ll give me a call so we can have an actual conversation before then. This is my office number.”

  His phone rang. “What did you do, get in touch with the Alumni Association?”

  She meant, finding out her name and phone number. Ryan said, “I thought you were never going to get married.”

  “At the time,” she said, “it seemed like a good idea.”

  “Who’s Delgado?”

  “None of your business.”

  “You look good these days, Janine. I wanted to tell you that, even if I don’t get to say anything else.”

  She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, “Look, I like my life exactly the way it is.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “You’re like, a hallucination or something.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I mean, overnight, you changed from a hippie punk into a—how old are you now anyway? Thirty-six?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “So, who did you get to marry you?”

  “Her name is Ellen. We have a little girl, two years old.”

  “Ellen,” Janine said, as if the name was something you could shake out and examine, like a piece of fabric. “That’s nice that you have a little girl.”

  “How about you, any kids?”

  “Not at present.”

  He waited, but she didn’t elaborate. “Why didn’t you say something. The night I fell.”

  “I don’t know. It was like The Twilight Zone. Too, too weird. You know you practically did a cartwheel. As if that wasn’t strange enough.”

  “So why did you drive off and leave me, I’m talking back in Iowa, I’m talking however many years ago, that was a genuinely crappy thing to do, you know?”

  While he waited for her to answer, he looked out the slice of window that had been allotted him. His office was in the north Loop, off Dearborn. His view, facing north, was hemmed in by a commercial building, occupants unknown, with a coffee shop and shoe repair and a couple of other retail outlets at street level. He was five stories up, near enough to sort out people as they passed along the sidewalks and waited at traffic lights, bundled against the cold, burdened with parcels, filing through a roofed construction tunnel built out into the street, intent on getting from one place to another. By six o’clock, the streets would be empty and unsafe. No one lived here.

  She said, “Were you following me the other night? At the restaurant?”

  “You’re kidding.” She wasn’t. “No, Ellen and I had
dinner at Delphine, and I was getting the car.”

  “I don’t remember giving you my phone number.”

  “I don’t remember you answering my question.”

  “I don’t know if I want to do this,” Janine said. “I have to hang up now.”

  The phone clicked in his ear. “Do what?” he said to the empty air.

  Ryan went home at the end of the day and his wife was standing at the kitchen sink, running water. She had been at the kitchen sink when he’d left that morning. His daughter demanded that he listen to a story about her baby doll, the baby was on the roof and she fell and her baby’s friend fell too. “Oh no,” Ryan said. “Did they get hurt? Did they have to go to the doctor?”

  “No. They ate some candy.”

  Both of them, wife and daughter, required his attention. From the moment he walked through the door, he was divided into slices and parceled out. There was a sound of metal slamming in the kitchen, and he looked up. His daughter sensed his focus wavering. Her voice rose, a treble spiral. Her two hands pulled at his fingers. Her story grew more and more desperate, packed with marvels. She—Anna—and the baby saw a dog and the dog stole the candy. It was a red dog. The dog’s name was . . . She was running out of details.

  “Was the dog named Tickle Me?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure? Because I saw a big red dog and you know what his name was? Huh? You know?”

  She collapsed in giggles, wanting and not wanting to say it. “Tickle . . .”

  “Huh? What was that?”

  “Tickle Me!”

  She shrieked as his fingers found her ribs. Red-faced, helpless, writhing from side to side. Her little Winnie-the-Pooh shirt riding up over her tummy. “Woof,” Ryan said. “Woof woof.”

  His wife called from the kitchen. “Please don’t get her all stirred up. I have to feed her.”

  He left off tickling. “OK, Anna Banana. Mom says we gotta calm down.”

  His daughter said the dog was Tickle Me, Tickle Me, and Ryan said the dog was all gone now. He redirected her attenton to the television and one of her Big Bird videos.

  In the kitchen his wife was shaking a strainer of potatoes. Steam made her face look like something boiled, and her hands were enveloped in oven mitts. At times he wondered if she purposely made herself into a drudge. “Hey,” he said, kissing her bare neck just below her pinned-up hair.

  His wife said, “I’m going to feed her and get her in her pajamas and then we can eat. If you aren’t too hungry to wait.”

  When they did sit down to dinner, his wife said that it was time to look for a day care, she had decided to go back to work, or at least look for a job. Ryan knew better than to react right away. These days he treated her as if she were a piece of glass with a crack in it. He forked up a piece of chicken, chewed and swallowed. He asked what had brought all this on, wasn’t it a little ahead of schedule? His wife said, “I feel like I’m locked in a box, just the two of us, there isn’t anybody in the building who has kids her age, there’s nobody to talk to, if I want to go outside with her we have to mount an expedition. And you know there’s all these other boxes with other moms and kids all over the city. It doesn’t seem like people ought to live that way. Maybe if we were near family, yours or mine, it’d be easier. I don’t know.”

  “If you think it would make you happy to get a job, then that’s the way you ought to proceed.”

  She looked at him with a measuring look. “Happy, you mean, to not be such a drag all the time.”

  “I don’t think you’re a drag, Ellen. Maybe bored. A little overwhelmed.”

  She only shrugged. They went back to eating. Their daughter was playing the Sesame Street video again. She never got tired of it. Ryan said, “You don’t really want to move, do you? I mean, the family part.”

  “Oh, I know we can’t. Even if we wanted to. Where would we work? But sometimes I think, we blew it, we were both so anxious to get away and not be one bit like our parents and we had to, it was so smothering. But back home, I can look up and down just about any street and there’s people I’m either related to or I’ve known them all my life and my parents have known them and my grandparents knew their grandparents and there’s a comfort in that. I miss it. That’s all I’m saying. Here, it’s like we’re not from anywhere.”

  “You wouldn’t really want Anna to grow up in a place where they think you’re going to hell, and they mean that literally, if you don’t vote Republican.”

  “They know they’re a part of something,” his wife said. “We’re just a part of each other.” She got up from the table and went to check on their daughter.

  The Great State of Alienation. It stretched from sea to shining sea. Everybody in America is one of two things, either in or out. His wife was right, they’d worked so hard and were so proud to be on the outside of everything they’d grown up with. But they were inside of nothing but themselves.

  City of brutal and wayward temperatures, of horizontal snow and lashing rains, city of instant potholes and blackened slush. By the end of February, winter had rolled back far enough to make you believe in spring. The gutters ran with snowmelt, the sidewalks gleamed. His wife found a part-time paralegal job, work she’d done before the baby, with the promise of full-time work to come. Their daughter went to a private day care a mile or two away, at the home of a lady who had come highly recommended. There was some squalling at first, some crying when she was left at Mrs. Carter’s, but that was short-lived, and it appeared that they had made a good decision. His wife seemed happier, more energized, and she dealt efficiently with all the chores and items necessary to get both herself and Anna out the door in the morning and ready for their days. Ryan dropped Anna off at Mrs. Carter’s and Ellen picked her up when she got off work in the early afternoons.

  It seemed that they had navigated one of those bump-in-the-road times, one of those comes-with-the-territory crises that you ought to see coming but you never did.

  He thought about Janine from time to time, but he made an effort to regard their encounters as something freakish and isolated, like seeing a celebrity on the street. Then she called him again at his office. He picked up his phone to hear her announce, “I wanted to clear a few things up.”

  “All right. Good.” He was treading water, wondering how to deflect, or answer, what might be coming.

  “I don’t write poetry anymore.”

  “OK.”

  “Not in any organized, disciplined way. It would be fair to say, occasionally.”

  “Well that’s . . .” He was about to say “better than nothing,” but stopped himself before that particular train wrecked. “Do you miss it?”

  “I miss a lot of things.”

  Another of their silences. Janine said, “It would be all right if we saw each other. Just to talk. There need to be some ground rules here.”

  “What the hell, Janine. You decide whatever it is you want and then do it. You always did anyway.”

  “And you always got pissy about it, you big Nordic palooka, because you never had an impulse you didn’t stifle or second-guess. Sorry. That’s a little harsh. Besides, I believe palooka refers to boxing, a second-rate boxer. I still have a poet’s precision with words.”

  In a nearly businesslike tone, they agreed to meet the next week on an afternoon Ryan believed it would be possible for him to leave work early.

  Just to talk. He guessed he believed that was all it was.

  Janine’s neighborhood was much as he’d expected it. Pretty, upscale, home to bookstore cafés and a rotating series of ethnic restaurants: Thai, Korean, Basque, Aztec. People walked past with copies of the Reader beneath their arms, or with trotting dogs on leashes, or both. Grown-up hip, with money. Janine’s building was a redbrick compound trimmed with white doors and woodwork and a carpeted lobby with a chandelier. It reminded him of those suburban banks meant to resemble gracious homes. He spoke through the intercom and was admitted.

  Her apartment was on the third
floor. Janine was standing at the entrance when he got off the elevator. “Over here.” Since they couldn’t decide whether to shake hands or embrace, they did neither. Janine stood aside to let him enter.

  “Nice place,” he said. “As a Nordic palooka, I think I’d probably be more comfortable out in the barn.”

  “I said I was sorry about that.” She shut the front door and stood next to him. He kept forgetting how short she was. “Give me your coat.”

  She took it away and Ryan was left to assess the raised, beamed ceiling, the fireplace made of slate and distressed wood, white walls, the flood of light from the high windows. There were a couple of large paintings, slashes of color. His Iowa/hick self couldn’t have said if they were good, bad, indifferent, art or non-art, but they were at least real, paint-on-canvas paintings.

  Janine had disappeared down a hallway—he had no clear sense of how large the place was—he felt a kind of vertigo, the strong sun coming in at this unexpected angle—wondering what blazing stupidity or delusion had brought him here in the first place—then Janine’s footsteps walking back to him.

  She was carrying a tray with two tall glasses. Ice cubes chinked. “Pomegranate juice,” she said. “It’s my new kick. Go on, try it.”

  She sat. Ryan sat too, but on the couch opposite her. The pomegranate juice was deep pink, like a stain. It tasted pink too. She was watching him. “Interesting,” he said, and set it back down.

  “I could get you a beer.”

  Ryan said no thanks. Janine leaned back in her chair and crossed her ankles in a tidy way. She was wearing sandals and her toenails were painted coral. Narrow black pants and a shirt that was some echo of her old gauzy florals, jade green and peacock. Hard to get a sense of her body beneath it, what might have changed. He tried not to think about any of that.

  Hair a little shorter, but still dark and wild. Her skin looked very white against it, even in the room’s strong light. Gold earrings and a gold cuff bracelet. No rings. The shape of her face, that perfect roundness, was now smudged or blurred. It was as if the face he remembered, her younger face, lay just beneath it, and every time he looked at her he had to try and bring his vision into focus.