The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  “So . . . ,” he began, spreading his hands to indicate the room around him. “All this . . .”

  He waited, but she only looked at him, politely expectant. “I thought you’d be living in a commune or something.” The wild girl he used to know, now looking every bit at ease in such a place.

  “We all grew up and got better furniture.”

  “Come on. What do you do for money?”

  “My dad got the car for me. I saw you eyeballing it.”

  “OK, but . . .”

  “My husband died.”

  “What, he . . .”

  “Died.”

  “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t sure if this was meant to be an answer to his question about money.

  “Three years ago of liver cancer. He never knew he had it, never had so much as a bad cold. He collapsed on the street, went into the hospital, and was gone six weeks later. His name was Walt, by the way. Walt Burnham. He was only forty-five.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. Her face flickered with something—impatience?—from having to tell the story too many times, from having to accept sympathy. “I’m sure you . . . somebody you loved . . .”

  “That’s usually why you marry a person.”

  There was another leaden silence. Marriage was love gone public. He had married Ellen because he loved her. He loved her because he had married her.

  Janine said, “He ran a brokerage house. A smart, smart guy. He had a nutty side too, that’s why we got along so well. He liked talking, cooking, company, goofing around, going places. We were married five years. I miss him.”

  Again Ryan murmured that he was sorry. Her hair fell into her eyes and she brushed it away. It was a gesture so familiar to him—and yet the woman herself had become so strange—it took him another moment to get his bearings.

  He said, “Do you remember my little sister, Torrie?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “She was in a bad car accident when she was seventeen. She’s better now but it left her with brain damage. Impairments. She still lives with my parents.”

  “Crap. Crap.” Janine glared at him. “That’s horrible. I’m sorry. Oh crap.”

  “I’m not there as much as I should be. I can’t be OK around her. Or be any way. It’s too sad. And she sees it in me, she can tell.”

  The sun lowered and Janine turned on the lamps. They talked about her family—they were as nuts as ever—and his job—he managed an IT division for an educational publisher. She asked him whatever happened to political science, and he said political science wasn’t the growth industry people made it out to be. They talked about Bush, whom Ryan said at least wasn’t as scary as Reagan. Janine said that nobody who ran the CIA should ever be president. Ryan’s eyes slid to his watch. He’d be expected back home soon.

  She saw him preparing to leave. “Would you like to see the rest of the place?”

  He said he would. They stood up and she walked him back through the hallway to a den—the white walls gave way to brick—dining room, a kitchen done in some high style, with the cupboards painted glazed orange. “Walt liked to cook,” Janine said. So this was the place where she’d lived with a husband. Too many things to comprehend, coming at him too fast. He felt as if he was in a movie running backward and forward in fits and starts.

  Another hallway—a hesitation, then she led the way—bedrooms, a pearly bathroom—Ryan ducked his head inside each, not really seeing anything, issuing fatuous compliments—“Nice! Great!”—until he could back himself out to the safety of the living room.

  Janine brought his coat. Smiled up at him. “Well,” he said. An experiment in speech. They leaned toward each other, attempted a hug. He felt the warm weight of her. He stepped closer and ran his hands along her blouse. Tried to get to her breasts through her shirt. Although he had spent years without thinking of it, he’d never forgotten the way the two of them fit together.

  Janine said, very softly, “Oh,” nothing more, and then they were kissing, and that felt amazing, better than you would have imagined just kissing to be, and then the dumb commotion of his dumb dick overwhelmed him, a slow fuse just now going off in his skin, and he was trying to reach every part of her, lifting her on one of his knees so she straddled it.

  Finally they backed away from each other. Janine raised his hand to her mouth, ran her tongue along one of his fingers, then back again. Her head bent over it, moving side to side.

  “I have to go,” Ryan said. His voice gone hoarse.

  “You were always like catnip to me, you know?”

  “I have to go now.”

  “You can come back.” Her face, a stranger’s face, suddenly close to his.

  “I don’t know.” And he didn’t. He didn’t know anything. He got himself downstairs and into the street. He didn’t look up in case she was watching him from her windows.

  His wife and daughter both wanted to tell him about their days, and he listened like a good daddy, presiding over dinnertime and storytime and bathtime and nobody noticed anything different about him and maybe there wasn’t. Then the weekend came and there were chores to do, and an excursion his wife wished the three of them to make to a children’s fair. He and his wife were good-humored with each other, one of their easy times.

  What did it mean that he could wall himself off in this way, keep one current of his life separate from another? Which part of him was false? He did and did not know himself, just as he did and did not know Janine. He felt that old bleak lonesomeness, that sense of standing outside the lit circle, looking in. That at least had not changed.

  On Monday afternoon he called Janine from the office. She said, “I wasn’t going to call. If you didn’t.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  They were used to silences by now and they let this one take its time. Then Ryan said, “Everything seems like such a long time ago. Not just you, but everything when I was a kid.”

  Janine said, “I’m sorry we didn’t go on that trip together. You know, for spring break.”

  “Yeah, I know the one.” He could better picture her, now that he’d seen where she lived. He imagined her in the sunny front room, or lying back in bed with her white legs bare.

  “I was really, really mad at you. Because you were acting like this furtive, chickenshit horny teenager. Then when we got back to school, you wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Yeah, things kind of fell apart after that. No surprise.” His hand prying her legs open. Her eyes closed, her mouth making shapes.

  The line stayed silent. Ryan wanted to ask, Are you still the same person you used to be? Am I? That same kid, in there somewhere? Instead he said, “Could I ask you why you don’t write poems anymore?”

  “I guess once Walt died, it became . . . it was all I wanted to write about, and it seemed . . . disgusting. To use something like that as fodder. The man died, for Christ’s sake. And all I could do was write a poem?” There was a rustle of sound that Ryan was able to identify as her shaking her head, the sound of her earrings against her hair. The way she used to crouch above him, her hair falling over her face.

  “Maybe,” he said, “you’ll feel differently about that in time.”

  “Maybe.”

  After a moment Janine said, “Look, I do want to see you again. I want you to come see me. You decide. You decide what it means.”

  They said Friday afternoon, same as before, and got off the phone as quickly as possible.

  He had never made a pact with himself that, once married, he could go outside of his marriage from time to time. But now he had to admit that he’d held something back, left one page of the contract unsigned. So that was one part of himself.

  The night before he was to see Janine, his wife said, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” They were in bed. The door to their room was left open and the light in the hall was on in case Anna needed to come find them in the night. Lately she’d been having her own fit of sleeple
ssness and woke them with requests for play or conversation. His wife raised herself up on one elbow, listening. “I thought she was up. Guess not. You’ve been ten miles away all night. What gives?”

  He could deny it, or come up with some lame excuse, something at work. “I don’t know. Just tired, I guess.” Lame-o. He attempted a small yawn.

  “You’re sure?” His wife had a habit of persistence. “Because you can tell me. Even if it’s something not so great.”

  “If there was anything to tell, I would tell you.”

  “I don’t want there to be these empty spaces between us. I want us to work through things. Like before I got the job, that wasn’t a good time for me but we managed. We came out on the other side of it.”

  “I’m glad you’re happier now.” He found her shoulder, patted it.

  “I don’t want us to be just coparents. You see couples like that, all they have in common are their kids.”

  Ryan said Of course, and Of course not. One or the other of those had to be the right answer. His wife rolled over in bed until the length of her body pressed against his. Her hands ventured over him. He froze. He felt a kind of desperate shame. Guys back in school who used to brag about it, I fucked two different girls in one day. He guessed he’d been envious. He guessed he’d had his own fantasies. But now . . .

  The mechanics of arousal, already under way. Maybe it was something you could get used to. He hadn’t thought it through yet. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to make love to his wife all the while pretending she was Janine.

  He covered his wife’s hands with his own, stilling them. He kissed her forehead and turned his face deeper into his pillow. After a time she withdrew her hands. Ryan pretended to fall asleep, and sometime after that, he did.

  The next morning he called Janine from the office. “Hi. Just checking in. I’ll be there by two. Earlier, if I can manage it.”

  “All right.”

  He didn’t trust the sound of her voice: remote, even a little sad. He didn’t want to start asking, What’s wrong? as his wife had the night before and hear her say, Nothing. It was only natural that one or the other of them would have a case of shaky nerves, or cold feet. All you could do was blunder through. He said, “I’m looking forward to seeing you. Really.”

  “Me too.”

  “OK then. Got to go.”

  He had his afternoon covered. He was always free to take more leeway with his work hours if he wanted; except for meetings and some of the corporate training sessions, all that mattered was getting tasks done and keeping systems up and running. It was just better if he was there, presiding over the cubicles. He had to wonder how it would look if he started ducking out regularly on Friday afternoons.

  His wife’s call came a little before twelve. “You have to go pick up Anna at Mrs. Carter’s. She has some kind of dental emergency. I mean Mrs. Carter. I can’t do it, I have to leave here for a deposition, it’s going to last all afternoon.”

  It took Ryan a minute to sort this out. “Pick her up, what am I supposed to do with her?”

  His wife said she had spent the last hour trying to get that covered. She’d talked to Delia, the college girl who occasionally babysat for them. He could take her to Delia’s apartment in Wicker Park, Delia could keep her until five, then one of them would have to get back there. Ellen would give him the address and phone number. “Or you could leave early and just go home with her.”

  “I can’t do that.” There would be new complications. Phone calls.

  “I’m sorry but this is what happens sometimes with day care. Do you have a pen?”

  He copied the numbers, already making calculations. North to Mrs. Carter’s, south again to Wicker Park, far north to Janine’s, then back in rush-hour traffic to pick up his daughter if he had to. He could still be at Janine’s by two. They’d still have a couple of hours. He tried to lay the groundwork for his not being able to pick Anna up at five. There was a meeting, it might run late . . . Every lie he told came out sounding punier. She had to hear it. But his wife was in a hurry to get off the phone and only told him to call her later.

  Dental emergency? He left the office, using his brand-new and genuine excuse, and retraced his morning’s path to the day care. Lake Shore Drive to Belmont. He drove as fast as he could, cruising just ahead of the traffic zooming around the lake. It was grotesque to think that everything was at the mercy of one old woman’s toothache. He got to Mrs. Carter’s—she had a mouthful of ice cubes and a washcloth pressed to her jaw, her apologies coming out in god-awful mumbles—collected Anna, plus Anna’s backpack, snack containers, boots, mittens, hooded winter coat, and buckled her into the car seat in back. “Where’s Mommy?” she asked.

  “Mommy’s at her office. Now you get to go see Delia at Delia’s house.”

  “I don’t want to!”

  “Well, you have to. Mommy’s at work. Daddy has to go back to work.” Stinking lying Daddy.

  “No!” Her face bunched into a knot.

  “Sounds like somebody needs a nap,” he said cheerily.

  His daughter got her hands on one of her toys, a doll whose hair she had pulled so often, it stood straight up like a fright wig, and began beating its plastic head against the window. “Anna, quit that.” She didn’t. “Do you want me to stop the car and give you a spanking?”

  It wasn’t a threat he could have acted on. He was preoccupied with trying to find his route south, wondering if he’d gone past Ashland already. When he found it and headed south, the traffic moved like a clog through a pipe. All manner of people he didn’t know and never would, taking up space with their grubby cars and grubby, depressing errands. There were times he hated the city and everyone in it. The doll’s head whacked against the window glass. “Anna? Did you hear me?”

  She lost her grip on the doll and it slid to the floor. “I want Baby!”

  “Well you weren’t being very nice to Baby. She can stay on the floor.”

  In the rearview mirror he saw her lower lip trembling. A squall ready to break out. Ryan coaxed her into the song about the little green frog sitting in the water, the little green frog, doin’ what he oughter. There were three or four verses, which carried them as far as North Avenue. He didn’t know the streets here and he didn’t much like the look of the place, with its air of incomplete urban renewal, its fortified corner groceries and druggie coffee shops. He didn’t think that his wife had been to Delia’s either, and now it seemed like an entirely wrongheaded plan to bring their daughter here. He had a moment of pointless anger toward his wife, then he made up his mind to offer Delia extra pay if she’d come back with him, watch Anna at their place, as she always had. It was already after one o’clock, but things could still work out.

  Delia wasn’t home. Her roommate, another sooty-eyed college girl, came to the door and said that Delia was in class, she’d be back a little later. “Are you sure?” Ryan said. “I mean, my wife talked to her . . .”

  The roommate gave him a what-do-you-want-me-to-do look. The apartment behind her gave off a whiff of cat. The hallway looked like a crime-scene photograph. The roommate bent down to speak with Anna. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

  “When is it you expect Delia?”

  The roommate said she couldn’t say, Delia must have got hung up somewhere. She got his daughter to answer her, finally, and the roommate said that Anna was a pretty name for a pretty girl.

  He couldn’t and wouldn’t leave Anna here with the roommate. It was a relief to recognize his limits.

  Back in the car, Anna announced that she had to go potty. “We’ll be home real soon,” Ryan told her, although they would not. It was after two when they reached their own door, then there was the rush to the bathroom, Anna’s coat to get off, her demands for juice, animal crackers, the Sesame Street tape he couldn’t find. “You can watch this instead,” he said. It was a soap opera that he counted on her being too young to understand. “I’ll find your show in a minute, OK?”

  In t
he bedroom, behind the closed door, he called Janine. “I am so sorry,” he told her. “This whole day’s been a landslide.” He began explaining: the phone call, the toothache, and so on.

  Janine listened until he reached the end. “Next week,” he said. “Either Friday, or, if Friday’s not good—”

  “Ryan?”

  He ran out of breath right then and there. “Yeah.”

  “Maybe I’m not as OK with this as I thought.”

  When he didn’t answer, she said, “Look at everything you had to do today, tie yourself in knots, get your little girl all upset . . .”

  “If I was there right now,” Ryan said, “you wouldn’t be having all these unselfish thoughts.”

  “Well maybe they wouldn’t be uppermost in my mind. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have them.”

  “This is shit, Janine.”

  “You’re angry. I can understand that.” Her tone was calm, reasonable. She sounded almost like his wife.

  “So I guess you’re bailing on me one more time. Wow. History repeating itself.”

  “I can’t be your, whatever it is you want. Long-lost fantasy girl. I can’t live the way I used to, all crazy and dangerous and wild. It takes a toll on you after a while. I’ve had to realize I need to protect myself. I need to protect myself from myself, if that makes—”

  Quietly, Ryan hung up the phone.

  When he was younger he had wished to see the world, and then he had wished to change it, and then he had been afraid it was passing him by. And his mistake had been to confuse a particular woman with the world.

  In the living room his daughter sat on the couch, deep in the folds of it so that her legs didn’t reach the edge of the cushions. On the television screen a handsome couple were having a serious conversation that appeared to have gone on for some time. His daughter was transfixed by them. Ryan sat down next to her, hoping to become engrossed in any story not his own.