The Compass

by Tammy Kling

  I wrote a letter to Lacy one morning, sitting at the kitchen table, telling her I that forgave her. I sealed it in an envelope and left it with a young man who was working the counter at the bookstore.

  I called my old boss and checked in, just to catch up with the past I’d run away from, and, as we talked about my old friends and colleagues and clients, I was surprised that I felt nothing. No desire to return, no longing to get back in.

  One afternoon I went back to the bookstore at closing time and waited for Lacy, having decided to give it one more try. When she emerged, she didn’t seem surprised to see me, and we walked.

  We sat outside in the bright California sunshine, talking, and this time things were different. It was as if we’d both had time to take a deep breath.

  We walked again and talked of our old life, our relationship, our love. How could we ever get them back?

  My life flashed across my mind, like a movie reel. Our wedding, my old job, Boo, the career I’d worked so hard to build—how everything that had been lost would have to be reinvented. We talked for a long time, and I was in a space of numbness, like the zone athletes fall into when they’re not really conscious of what is, or what is not. In the end, the zone is the space where everything just flows.

  It’s as if you’re wearing blinders, yet moving fluidly toward a dream. I said that I’d watched her walk out of that store, and I asked her how she could be so happy, how she could smile and laugh and conduct her life as if nothing at all had happened.

  “And you’re a neurologist, Lacy. How can you work here?” I felt no bitterness then, just an evenness I hadn’t been able to access before. I remembered Solomon and what he’d said about how we were judged and defined by our jobs, instead of by who we are.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, catching myself. “What you do isn’t who you are.”

  She looked away.

  “I let go of all that,” she said quietly. “Who cares anyway? I love, and I remember our little girl, but I had to let go of the tragedy and the trappings of our old life in order to move on. I had to forgive myself.” She shifted her balance, hooking her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans. She looked long and lean, three inches taller than I’d seen her before, in the ballet flats she used to wear. In heels she looked more like a model, her legs slender and firm.

  “I had to let go of the medical practice,” she added. “It’s not what I want to do with the rest of my life. I’ll die if I sit around and think of Boo all day.” She broke down and covered her face with her hands.

  I said nothing, taking it all in. After a few minutes she regained her composure and looked at me.

  “Think about how we used to live before,” she said. “Was that success?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “We had a great life. We had Boo with us. You were at the height of your career. You had the respect of your peers, and your practice was thriving.”

  “Always working. Barely passing each other in the house.”

  “We had to, Lace. We were building a life. That’s what it takes.”

  “Is it really?” A flash of anger rose in her.

  I said nothing because I didn’t know the answer. Traveling the world, stripped of practically every material thing, made me realize that I was still myself, and the material things had added up to nothing.

  “The truth is,” she said, before I could respond, “that I’ve spent the last several weeks thinking about the way we used to live. I’ve given it a lot of thought and been through a lot of therapy, Jonathan. We were always in motion, never in pause. Never once did we stop to take a deep breath and examine the authenticity of our lives.”

  “Authenticity?” I couldn’t believe her words. She certainly didn’t sound like the Lacy I knew, the one who couldn’t live without her morning Starbucks on the way to work, the one who made lists for every hour and activity of the day. The one who valued intellect and achievement above everything else.

  “Some strange things have happened since Boo’s death,” she said slowly.

  “What kind of things?” I asked.

  “Well, I was angry at myself for a long time . . . suicidal almost. I didn’t see any purpose for continuing. But these strange people came into my life, even when I wasn’t listening, or in search of them.”

  My heart clenched.

  I cleared my throat, but the words wouldn’t come.

  We had traveled the same journey, yet each alone. I thought of Marilyn and Solomon and Pete and Toin and how they all seemed to have been sent into my life for a reason, to deliver a message about the future. Each one was exactly what I needed during that moment, in my darkest hours. Each one was like a mountain guide throwing me a life-saving rope, holding my weight somehow, as I rappelled down the steepest cliff of my life.

  “There were moments of extreme sadness and desperation . . . ” she said, “as if I’d lost my way and would never find my sense of purpose or direction. But now I’m more centered than ever before, and it’s almost as if a sense of forgiveness has settled over me.

  “Jon, I’ve forgiven myself.” She looked me in the eyes. “But I wonder if you’ll ever be able to forgive me.”

  I pulled her close and held her as tightly as I could. And as I did so I cried, sobbing into her hair like it was a child’s blanket. As my gasping sobs began to subside, she began to speak again.

  “We built a life and bought a nice house and had a child and worked all hours of the day and night. But there’s more to life than the way we were. If we had really been authentic, we would have stopped to listen, to spend time together, and to really think about the things we wanted.”

  She pulled away and held me at arms length.

  “I loved our life,” she said.

  I want it back, I thought, as her eyes surveyed the street. I looked at the light surrounding her and the warmth in her eyes, and all of the bitterness and hatred I’d felt melted away.

  “But did you love our life?” she challenged. “Did you really? Or are you just romanticizing it now?” Her eyes flashed. “I remember many nights when you were traveling on business, and I wouldn’t even be able to get you when I called the hotel room. I remember our arguments after that, and how we didn’t talk to each other for days.”

  “Lacy . . . ”

  She put her hand up.

  “Look, I’m not trying to bring up old garbage. I’m just trying to point out that we didn’t have a perfect existence. I was drinking a lot, nearly every night. You were traveling a lot. It wasn’t perfect. Only Boo was perfect.”

  I shivered, either from the cold or the memories. I crossed my arms for warmth.

  “I miss her,” I said. It was the most honest conversation we’d had in years, or perhaps ever.

  “I miss her, too,” Lacy said. “What do we have without her?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know. We still have each other, don’t we?”

  “I don’t think we can move forward with each other until we’re completely honest and authentic. That might mean some soul searching.”

  “I’ve searched,” I said quickly. “My soul has been searched.” And to my surprise, I realized that I meant it. These weren’t just words designed to bridge the gap.

  “Did you do anything that mattered while you were away?” she asked, although it sounded as if she really didn’t want the answer.

  A man passed on the street and entered the bookstore, and they nodded a hello.

  I reached out for her, touching her hair.

  “You cut it,” I said.

  “I wanted a new beginning. I changed everything.”

  I drew my hand back.

  “Everything?” I thought about the man. Was he . . . ?

  “I’m not seeing anyone,” she said.

  “But you’re not wearing your ring.”

  Lacy glanced at her vacant ring finger and took a deep breath. We had gone to Laguna to pick out those rings, together, from the nicest jewelry store in town.

&nb
sp; “I’ve learned that the things we can’t see are far more powerful than the things we can see,” she said. “Yet we’ve all been driven by the things that are there in front of us. All I can say, Jonathan, is that I’ve started focusing on the unseen, the love, the memories, the relationships.”

  Lacy reached out and held my hand, and I felt an electric charge travel up my arm as strong as the day we’d first touched. I pulled her toward me and we embraced.

  “We will always have Boo,” she said. “In our hearts. But if I can let go of the grief enough to live, you can, too. We can still make a life. We need to forgive each other for what we’ve done, even though there’s a part of me that won’t ever release the guilt and despair I feel about what I did that day.

  “Yet we need to live.”

  Be alive, Jonathan.

  I inventoried the things in our old house and was surprised by how numb I felt about it all. The bikes hanging in the garage brought back new memories instead of old ones. Seeing the Trek made me think of Nu Nu instead of my old life. The small backyard only reminded me of the magnificent earth surrounding Pete’s cabin and the way I had wandered the land for hours observing the birds, squirrels, and deer.

  Lacy and I spent days talking in her flat and at the house we once shared until gradually we could see our lives merging again. Ironically, I had let go. I realized that everything in our lives wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be, and that the plan we held in our minds wasn’t necessarily the one we would live. We spend decades building, based on an idea of what we think we need to build, and what others have built.

  But what if you throw away the plans and build something new?

  In the end it was all about forgiveness. I did something I never thought I could do, and it reminded me of others in the world who did things they never imagined they’d do, things they said they could never conceive.

  We woke up one night wrapped in each other’s arms, and I turned to her in the dark.

  “I forgive you,” I whispered, and I pulled her close. We stayed there in that cocoon for a long time, Lacy sobbing silently on my shoulder.

  “I forgive myself, too,” she said softly.

  “I love you,” I told her.

  A month after my return, we placed the house on the market. The market was slow, though, and we spent the next couple of months cutting back foliage and landscaping and preparing it for a new owner. Lacy trimmed the rose bushes and brought me a red bloom, which we kept in a glass on the counter in the kitchen.

  We spent nights on the floor by the fire and had dinners on the back porch. We went to one of our old haunts one night, an Italian place in town, and within minutes, we were approached at the table by one of the couples we had known through Lacy’s medical practice. It took them time to size us up, and as we sat there, I watched her with her auburn bob, me with my scruffy face, wondering how they’d recognized us at all.

  The wife surveyed me cautiously.

  “How are you?” she asked, as if she was approaching a fragile piece of china.

  “We’re great,” I announced.

  Lacy grinned. She invited them to sit, but they remained standing, like two Greek statues in a museum.

  “We can’t stay,” the husband explained, pointing across the room. “We’ve got a dinner party in full swing.” He was a noted neurosurgeon in Orange County. He wore a dark silk suit that was worth more than everything in my closet.

  “What are you doing these days?” the wife asked.

  Lacy shrugged. “Doing?” She kept her eyes on mine.

  “You know,” the woman said. “For work. I noticed your practice was closed.”

  The woman wore a cream suit with a large necklace, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She stood with her hands on her hips, and a small, jeweled clutch tucked under her arm. They were old money, a part of the wealthy establishment that had settled there years before all of the nouveau riche had moved in. Her husband’s father had been a surgeon, and his father before him. They were well-respected icons in the medical community and high on the social ladder. Their home was perched on a hillside above the ocean, and when Lacy and I had visited, they took us to the garage and showed us their Bentley.

  “I’m working in a bookstore,” Lacy said confidently. “The Independent. You should come in some time.”

  The woman stepped back as if she’d been slapped.

  “A . . . a . . . bookstore . . . ?” She quickly regained her composure. I remembered the last time we had seen them at a cocktail awards party for the medical industry and the feeling I’d had about them.

  It was the same feeling I had now, a feeling of discomfort and struggle to talk about anything of importance, only back then we’d remained in their social circle, attending every event they ever invited us to, living on autopilot.

  Maybe this is what Lacy was talking about, I mused. It felt authentic to dislike them now, authentic to realize that we didn’t need to be friends with someone just because we shared a profession. What was that anyway?

  Her husband gripped her elbow and nodded toward a large table in the other room—it was filled with sharply dressed men and women.

  “We really need to be going,” he said. He nodded at both Lacy and me and said it was nice to have seen us.

  He didn’t ask us to join them.

  That dinner, though brief and ordinary, was a turning point. It was an encounter with the past, and I could feel my compass shift.

  It shifted from the then into the now, and with it came a feeling of total release, as if everything I’d ever cared about had changed. I no longer felt like we had to network with those people just to stay in their good graces. I no longer cared about the nice cars and the clothes and the cufflinks and the limos. I didn’t care about the next rung on the ladder at the company.

  My compass had moved, and I told Lacy so a few days later.

  “I had to travel the whole world to figure things out, and you figured it all out just by staying here,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “I still haven’t figured anything out. It just is what it is.”

  Our house sold within three months, in one of the worst real estate markets the nation had ever experienced, something I saw as another sure sign that it was time to move on.

  Each week we searched for signs and listened.

  And the signs came. The sadness was unbearable, and there were reminders of Boo everywhere. It was clear to Lacy and me that we couldn’t stay, no matter how close we felt to her in this place. We had a garage sale and sold the contents of the house, garage, and closets. Our families flew in for the weekend to help and camped out on the floor in sleeping bags. My mother cooked large meals for the entire group using two pots we had left out and we ate on paper plates in a circle sitting on a blanket in the empty living room. I felt like a kid again, back to the days we used to picnic with our parents. My brother washed and gassed up the Lexus and readied it for our journey.

  Lacy and I had studied a map and picked a handful of states we’d always wanted to go to but had never seen. We decided to pack up and move the rest of our limited belongings to Utah, where we’d find a cabin in the mountains in a remote town that was easy to get in and out of.

  Other than that, we had no criteria and no agenda.

  It was a new beginning.

  The first night in our new town, we drove our way up a winding road to discover a romantic mountainside restaurant. We ordered steak and salads and had a nice bottle of wine and talked about the money we’d saved over the years and stuffed away during Lacy’s first few years in practice. We made plans right then for our new beginning, and, by the end of dinner, we decided we’d open an adventure travel company, to help other people find themselves.

  “What if they’re not lost?” I asked.

  “Maybe they are, but they don’t even know it yet,” she countered.

  I smiled, knowing that Lacy was right. On my own journey I’d met several people along the way, and I’d
discovered that the true meaning of life was to dig deep to find your destiny and your God-given gifts. Only then, would you truly be plugged-in and connected to the world.

  It was in this connectedness that we would thrive, prosper, and be energized enough to create and give back to others.

  “Sometimes your life doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Sometimes the decisions we make seem to make themselves, and it’s a magnetic pull that you have to follow.”

  We worked through our new life in Utah, found a cabin on the side of the mountain, and enjoyed being tethered to nothing. Sometimes we cried about missing Boo, but mostly we looked forward and prayed our way through it.