When You Went Away

by Michael Baron

  This was one of the things I never really understood about Codie. Plenty of men – especially Manhattan men – could appreciate and identify with her work life. And she certainly had no trouble finding dates. But even in high school, she kept her relationships very brief and I never heard her talk about a partner with any more enthusiasm than she might a new restaurant.

  We ate quietly for a few minutes. I gave Reese strained applesauce for the first time and he took to it with the same enthusiasm as most of the food he tried. Clearly, he was going to be a good eater. I looked forward to cooking for him.

  “How are Grace and Ed doing,” I asked, referring to her parents.

  Codie looked up at me sadly.We managed to go an hour without mentioning Maureen’s death, though both of us were almost surely thinking of her the entire time. “They’re struggling. Dad worse than Mom, interestingly enough.We were in the middle of a conversation about the stock market the other day and he just broke down. They call you, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, a couple of times a week. But I always get the impression that they’re doing it to cheer me up. Lots of questions about the baby. I’ve invited them to visit a dozen times and they keep putting it off. I think they’re not sure what to make of this house without Maureen in it.”

  “I can understand that,” she said gravely.

  I pointed a fork toward her. “Don’t understand that. I don’t want you to ever feel weird about coming here.” I shifted the fork toward Reese. “He needs his aunt. Especially since she brings him great toys when she comes to visit.”

  Codie smiled and looked over at the baby. “He really is adorable. He would have wrapped Maureen around his little finger.”

  “Nah, she wasn’t that easy. But he would have gotten most of what he wanted anyway.”

  She took Reese’s hand and kissed it. “Is it scary doing this alone?”

  “The scary part is that I have to do it alone. Actually doing it isn’t that tough. I mean, you keep moving, you know? We’re getting by all right.”

  She nodded and assumed a thoughtful expression that was just like her sister’s. “I know I’m out of my depth here, but if there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know.”

  “Do this. Come see us. We both could really use that.”

  “I will, I promise. I should’ve gotten out here before now, but, I don’t know, there’s so much I really haven’t dealt with yet. Maureen was always there, you know?”

  “I know. For both of us. Always. But I think because of that it’s really important that we keep the lines open between us, that we remain family.”

  “You’re right. It’ll be easier from now on.”

  I patted her hand and Reese pounded on his high chair tray, obviously peeved that he stopped being the center of attention for a few seconds.

  I cleaned the dishes while Codie entertained the baby and then the three of us played on the floor together for a while before his bedtime. I assumed Codie would go home then, but she stuck around while I got Reese into his crib.

  When I returned from his room, she was sitting at the dining room table, having poured herself another glass of wine. When she saw me, she held up her glass.

  “Want some more?” she said.

  “Just a little. I’m on duty.”

  She poured some for me and then looked up as I sat down. “Listen,” she said, “I got a message from Tanya.”

  “You did? When?”

  “A few days ago. Through a remailer just like yours. It was a really long one. I got the impression that she was unloading.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything. About Mick, and about you and Maureen, and about why she wanted to take off the way she did.”

  In other words, Tanya had been willing to tell Codie all of the things she had been unwilling to tell us. “What did she say?”

  “She told me that she didn’t want me to tell the two of you any of this.”

  I could feel myself getting angry. “Is that a reasonable request under the circumstances?”

  “I think it might be. Look, if she had told me anything that could help you find her or anything that suggested she was in any kind of trouble, I’d tell you in a second. But she’s always trusted me and as stupid as it might be – I mean, it’s not like she’s going to know whether I talked to you about this or not – I feel like I need to honor that trust now.”

  “Just tell me one thing: does she hate us?”

  “She doesn’t hate you. In fact, this might have less to do with you and Maureen than you think. She wasn’t that specific, but I think this was a lot more about her need to prove herself as a fully evolved human being to Mick than anything else.”

  I could feel my bile rise. “She couldn’t do that here?”

  “Mick doesn’t believe in families.”

  “He doesn’t believe in families? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “He thinks that families foster codependency and perpetuate dysfunctional behavior.”

  “Maybe first I’ll kill his professors.”

  Codie reached out for my hand and squeezed it. “She wrote that to me. Her aunt. A family member.

  She hasn’t been brainwashed. She’s just trying things on for size.”

  “And what if it fits?”

  “Do you really think it’s going to fit? You and Maureen raised her.”

  I looked down at my wineglass. “The last couple of years have been tough.”

  “They haven’t been as tough as you think. I’ve heard her side of some of those arguments. They aren’t very different from your side. That means in some twisted way that you were actually communicating.” “Were being the operative word.”

  “I can’t tell you how to feel about this, Gerry. And I miss her like crazy myself. We were real buddies, you know? But with everything that’s going on in your head right now, don’t make yourself crazy over what you did or Maureen did to drive Tanya away.” “She wants me to try to be happy for her. That’s what she wrote in her last message. Can you believe it?”

  “So?What’s the downside?”

  I looked up at Codie as if I hadn’t heard her correctly. “What?”

  “What’s the downside of being happy for her?”

  “You’ve had more wine than I thought you did.”

  “Really, Gerry, what’s the downside of looking at this as something other than an international crisis?” I shook my head in bewilderment. It was hard to believe that Codie couldn’t understand why I felt the way I did. “My 17-year-old daughter has run away with a 20-year-old guy and is riding with truckers to who the hell knows where.”

  “And you can’t do a single thing about that.”

  I smirked. “Did I forget to mention that part?”

  “My point is that feeling angry and frustrated isn’t particularly useful to you.”

  I threw up my hands. “So I should celebrate it instead? Maybe I should start having a better time being a widower as well.”

  Codie grabbed my face with both of her hands, a gesture that took me completely by surprise. This one was definitely not in Maureen’s repertoire. “You’re not paying attention to me.”

  “I think I might be.”

  “Well then you aren’t as smart as I always thought you were. Think about it for a second. Tanya’s traveling around the countryside with a jerk. She’s putting herself in potentially dangerous situations and she hasn’t seen enough of the world to know how to deal with those situations.”

  “Which piece of this isn’t my point?”

  “This. Tanya is a really good kid. There’s actually a remote possibility that the jerk isn’t a complete jerk. And she knows a whole lot more about the way the world works than you think.”

  I spoke sharply. “And you know this because of other things she’s told you in confidence over the years?”

  “I know this because I’m not her parent and I have been paying attention. Is it crazy that a straight-A student would forego her
last two years of high school to do something like this? Of course it is. But Tanya was bored to death with school and she was bored to death living in Suffolk County and strolling down the quaint streets of Port Jefferson. Then Mick comes along and exposes her to a whole new way – a much more sophisticated way – of looking at the world and she latches on to it. This is nothing more than an elaborate research project. There is no chance that she’s going to be riding with truckers the rest of her life.”

  “Is there a message here?”

  “The message is that it wouldn’t hurt you to look at it from her perspective. She’s asked you to be happy for her. She has no idea that her mother is gone. And she’s out there on a voyage of discovery.”

  “She’s seventeen,” I said louder than I probably should have.

  Codie took a deep breath. “Gerry, you have every legitimate reason to feel the way you do. But it isn’t helping you. At all.”

  “So I should revel in her experience and laugh giddily when she winds up dead in a ditch.” I spit out these words and they felt ugly even as they left my mouth.

  Codie looked at me as though I’d truly disappointed her. “When the hell did you become such a pessimist?”

  “You know when I became such a pessimist.”

  She looked toward the floor. “I didn’t realize both of you died that day.”

  Hearing this from her, watching her say it the way she said it, made me overwhelmingly sad. I put my head down on the table. Codie leaned over and kissed the back of it. “Only part of the world ended, Gerry.”

  I looked up and I’m sure I had confusion and distress written all over my face. Codie reached for me and I hugged her. As I did, I felt like my body disassembled. Sobs tore into me. I hadn’t cried this hard since the day I buried Maureen. It took me several minutes to regain my composure and several more before I felt comfortable speaking. Through it all, Codie held me, stroking my hair and not saying anything. I didn’t realize that she too was crying until I pulled back.

  “I’m a total wreck,” I said softly, my eyes cast downward.

  Codie reached a finger under my chin and raised my head. “Not total,” she said with a smile I wish I could have framed.

  She stayed until nearly ten. When I calmed enough, we sat in the family room, traded stories about work, and skirted around the edges of reminiscence. Things had already gotten emotional enough for one evening. So we laughed about the cranberry sauce incident from three Thanksgivings past. And we debated the advice Maureen gave her about dealing with a difficult friendship. And we talked about the spring vacation that Tanya spent with Codie – how Tanya came home beaming and how Maureen and I enjoyed ourselves nearly as much doing very different things. But we didn’t wallow and we spent more time in the present than I expected us to.

  This was by far the longest period of time I had ever spent alone with Codie. I saw her regularly and often picked up the phone when she called the house, but the two of us had never just gone out for a drink, or to run an errand together. The circumstances had simply never arisen. Now I couldn’t believe that it had taken this long for us to get to this level.

  And crying with her had been a welcome release. Unlike everyone else who tried to offer consolation, Codie truly understood how much I lost. It made a difference. I realized then that feeling for someone’s pain was overwhelmingly different from experiencing someone’s pain. In that way, Codie and I were linked inseparably. We felt Maureen’s absence even more than her parents did. More than anyone who was aware she was dead.

  It was nice to know that we had crossed some kind of bridge, that our future visits would be more than ceremonial ones, punctuated by polite conversation and increasingly longer silences. Instead, I would anticipate them with great enthusiasm.

  When she left, I pulled her close to me. “This was really good,” I said. “Let’s do it again soon.”

  “We will,” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “Really soon.” And then she ran her fingers through her hair just as Maureen used to and said, “Gotta go.”

  I stood in the doorway until Codie’s car disappeared down the road. Then I went to the library and booted up the computer. No new e-mail worth giving any attention. I pulled up Tanya’s most recent message and read it again. Try to be happy for me. The sentiment still rankled, but I thought about what Codie said emphatically tonight.

  What was the downside? Was it the concern that seeing this from her perspective might make it more acceptable to me that she was gone? Was it the fear that my being happy for her even for a second would somehow authorize her to stay away forever?

  Codie was right about a lot of what she said. Tanya was smart and much more sophisticated than most of her friends. I nicknamed her “Queenie” when she was still a toddler because of her regal bearing; she had stopped letting me call her that a few years ago. There was little to no chance she was going to adopt this lifestyle permanently. She was on a kind of elaborate research project that was certainly more perilous than most and could conceivably drive her away from me forever, but one that, if she stayed safe and didn’t fall in with the wrong people – two huge “ifs” – could teach her remarkable things.

  I’ll try to be happy for you, Tanya. I’ll try to cut through the misery I feel in your absence and a whole other level of misery that you’re not even aware of, to see how this could be a special and meaningful and even innocent time for you. I probably won’t be able to be happy for youmuch, but maybe I’ll be able to be happy for you a little.

  I love you, Queenie. I want you to come home. I want us to pull this family together and gain strength from one another. I want you with me to build a living monument to your mother and for us to remember her in our actions for the rest of our lives.

  But if you want me to be happy for you while you’re doing whatever you’re doing wherever you’re doing it, I’ll try.

  I’ll probably fail, but I’ll try.

  S IX

  Some Other Time

  I began to adjust to my return to work. After a few weeks, I was back into the rhythm of the office. While not nearly as diverting as I had found it to be at other challenging times in my life, the job was something I could focus on for increasingly longer stretches. The deadline of the Christmas catalog lent a certain amount of propulsion to every day.

  This wasn’t to say that I didn’t meditate on the pictures of Maureen, Tanya, and Reese every time I sat at my desk, or that I didn’t check in on Lisa more often than was probably necessary (or, from her perspective, welcome). But I began to have ideas again and I could look at the piles of paper in front of me as surmountable.

  I was addressing one such pile when Ally Ritten knocked on my door. Until she joined my team, I was only peripherally aware of her. I heard she was smart, others worked well with her, and she came up with some trinket or other for catalogs I hadn’t worked on as a sideline to her primary marketing job. In the first couple of team meetings I had with her, I was impressed with her energy and with how quickly she could run with an idea. She quickly made more of a contribution than anyone else did on the team, and I was sure this was something she would be very good at full time. I’m sure Marshall had some notion of this, which was why he told me to bring her on, though he hadn’t yet suggested anything like a department transfer.

  “Hi, am I interrupting?” she said, standing half in and half out of the doorway.

  “I’m plodding through some vendor contracts. Please interrupt.”

  She sat down across from my desk. “What do you think of cookie jars?”

  “Filled or unfilled?”

  “Well, that’s sort of where I was going with this. What about offering a set of personalized cookie jars? You know, ‘Mom’s Favorite Cookies’ or ‘Jimmy’s Favorite Cookies.’” This way everyone could always have their cookies in their own cookie jar without compromise or, you know, cross-contamination.” “Cross-contamination?”

  “Oatmeal cookies don’t taste as good if you get Oreo on them.�
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  “They don’t?”

  “I think a certain sector of our audience might believe that to be the case.”

  I looked at her skeptically.

  “Okay, I’m part of that sector,” she said. She seemed embarrassed by the admission, as though she told me something terribly intimate.

  “Oatmeal cookies aren’t allowed to touch Oreos?” She reddened slightly. “It gets chocolate on them. Then they don’t taste as much like oatmeal anymore.” “So it would be better if Mom’s cookies and Jimmy’s were segregated.”

  She closed her eyes. “This was a stupid idea.”

  I laughed. “It’s not a stupid idea. We sell tens of thousands of personalized TV remote caddies every year. Trust me; there are no stupid ideas. Actually, you satisfied my number one rule for pitching a concept – that you be part of the market for it. The first best way to test the viability of a product is to know that you would buy it yourself.”

  She nodded and seemed to regain a little of her composure. Clearly, Ally had been nervous about pitching me one-on-one and I unintentionally made her more nervous by teasing her.

  “If this is your number one rule, shouldn’t everyone on your team know it?” she said with a smile. Obviously, she gathered her feet under her quickly.

  I smiled back. “Now everyone does.”

  “Thanks. I’ll play with this a little and let you get back to your contracts.” She glanced over at my desk. “Is that the baby?” she said, pointing to a picture frame.

  I handed the photograph to her. “The picture’s a couple of weeks old, so of course he looks completely different now.”

  “He’s really cute.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Reese?”

  “Yeah, Reese. It’s Greek for, ‘He who doesn’t sleep very much.’”

  She grinned and handed the picture back to me. At the same time, she nodded toward another frame. “Is that him with your wife?”

  I took the photograph of the two of them cuddling that Saturday before our last date together. I touched the frame, but I didn’t pick it up. “Yeah, it is.”