Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  I had never, however, worried Adam would leave me before he did just that.

  Not once.

  How could this be, wondered the women of my book club when I admitted, after breaking down in tears over a discussion of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, that Adam and I were no more—and worse, that I had not seen it coming? Surely this scenario must have crossed my mind once or twice, they gently insisted; most of us had been meeting for a decade, so they were familiar with my proclivity for unlikely disaster preparedness. It was as simple as believing he loved me so much he would never hurt me like that, I told them, and for this confession I was rewarded with the knowledge that every woman there, regardless of current marital status, had imagined in detail the worst-case scenario I had never anticipated and was now living through.

  What I did not tell the women of my book club was that Adam had been my one sure thing.

  “If you marry—and I’m sure as sugar not saying you should—choose a man who loves you just a little more than you love him,” my mother told me when I was growing up. She knew of what she spoke: my father had promised to make her his wife after she moved from Virginia to Michigan with him, only to run back home without her the minute he learned his seed had sprouted. She was just nineteen at the time. While she had other boyfriends over the years, she never trusted a man enough to share her life with her, because, she said, she couldn’t find one who loved her enough.

  My mother was right about most things, but I thought her advice on love was tainted by my father’s betrayal. Anyway, it wasn’t as though a person got to choose whom she loved, I told myself when I fell for a senior named Ian Rausch halfway through my freshman year at the University of Michigan. Ian was pale to the point of translucence, and the Parliament Lights he chain-smoked emanated from his every pore, but he had moony brown eyes and wrote poetry, and I loved him on sight. He was going to hike through Central America after graduation, he warned me after he took me to bed for the first time—this was Ian’s idea of a date—so I wasn’t to get too comfortable. But the sex was fantastic and Ian wrote poems about me, and I didn’t yet understand that neither was the same thing as love. So I bought a Spanish-English dictionary and told Ian that if he wanted a traveling companion, I was ready and willing. Then one evening I knocked on his door, and a woman wearing only a t-shirt answered.

  Ian left town at the end of that summer, though I later heard he only made it as far as Texas. I spent the first half of my sophomore year recovering from him, and the second half rebuilding my grade point average, which had suffered from my lovelorn lack of focus and was threatening to end my full-ride scholarship. By the time I slid into my seat in a political science seminar one frigid January morning my junior year, I had begun to think that maybe there was something to my mother’s advice.

  I found myself behind a herd of men, the likes of whom had sat before me in almost every class I had taken. As usual, they all seemed identical: wealthy, white, entitled. Yet for whatever reason, one man’s profile—the regal slope of his nose, the outline of his full lips, his smooth neck emerging from his cable-knit sweater—piqued my interest.

  Maybe it was pheromones; maybe it was fate. But I had been staring at him for a few seconds when he spun around and smiled, like he had been waiting for me to notice him. “Hello,” he said to me. “I’m Adam.”

  I smiled back. “Maggie,” I said. And then I turned my attention to the role of executive power in a constitutional democracy and barely gave him another thought.

  Adam sought me out after class; he would later tell me that seminar had been the longest fifty minutes of his life. He had electric green eyes and a soccer player’s lean build, and I was immediately attracted to him. But whereas he declared our first kiss earth-shattering, it would take several gentle pointers before I felt the same spark when his lips were on mine.

  Once we made it to bed, however, Adam proved to be a far more generous lover than Ian had ever been. And there was something addictive about how he enveloped me in his safe, secure existence. It was not just that he took me on actual dates and surprised me with novels, nice cardigans, and all sorts of other thoughtful gifts. It was that he made me feel like he had been waiting his whole life for me. Not once did he talk about dating other women; I can’t even remember him so much as turning his head to check out another coed. He told me he loved me two months into our relationship. When I finally realized I was in love with Adam, nine months after we began dating, it was not the same euphoric, libidinous tingle I had felt for Ian. It was deeper, more satisfying—and mildly terrifying. I was too young to settle down.

  “Maggie, you’d be God’s own fool to lose that boy,” my mother told me. We were standing in the kitchen of her apartment at the end of my senior year; Adam had wanted to meet her, so we had driven his old green Volvo up to her most recent place in Flint. It was an apartment—a tiny one, but at least it was not a trailer or a few rooms in a friend’s place. I hated myself for feeling glad about that, because I knew Adam wouldn’t have cared either way.

  “I know, Ma,” I said.

  “I mean it. He loves you almost half as much as I do, which is an awful lot,” she said, her eyes trained on the potato she was peeling.

  “Are you making an observation or telling me what to do?” I remarked.

  “You may know more than me on some counts, Margaret Louise, but not this one,” she said quietly. “He’s a sure thing.”

  But how could I decide on a single person with whom to spend the rest of forever at twenty-one years old? What if I was wrong, or one of us changed our minds—or simply changed? “Stability isn’t everything,” I argued.

  My mother looked at me with her golden-brown eyes, which were almost identical to my own, and in an instant my childhood came back at me. Stashing my few belongings into a garbage bag and fleeing our latest home in the middle of the night because my mother couldn’t scrape together the rent. Not knowing if my ramen cup would be my last meal for a while. The half a year we spent living with her grandparents in a coal-mining town wedged between the hills of Kentucky and Virginia, until my mother ran into my father at the Piggly Wiggly and hightailed us right back to Michigan. My mother had made sure I always felt loved, but aside from that love, she had been unable to provide much by way of stability.

  “Isn’t it?” she said. Then she began to cough. She had cut back to a half pack a day, but the damage had long been done. I lightly patted her on the back, waiting for the hacking to pass; when it finally did, we went back to talking about lunch.

  Three decades later, I cursed myself for so much misdirected catastrophizing. I had not been crushed by an air conditioner (yet). My children were mostly happy, even if one made me feel like an afterthought, and the other relied on his parents’ charity to make it in a loosely defined creative career in New York City. Neither Adam nor I had been diagnosed with cancer, heart disease, or any number of conditions that he in particular had a strong genetic predisposition to. We had been through lean times, especially after Adam left his partner-track position to open his own firm. But we had never been unable to put food on the table or pay our bills.

  Come to find out that all that time, I should have been expending my mental energy on my so-called sure thing.

  My mother had died of lung cancer nineteen years earlier, when she was just fifty-four. I would have given anything for her to see even a few more months of life. But as I got into bed one balmy night at the end of September and leaned over to smell Adam’s pillow—which I still could not bring myself to wash, let alone throw out—and then pulled it close to my body, feeling as alone as I ever had, I had a terrible thought.

  At least my mother had not lived long enough to learn that my sure thing had been nothing but a fairy tale.

  THREE

  “Maggie? It’s Rose.”

  Of course it was. It was early October, and though I had not heard from Adam, his mother continued to call me every two to three days, just as she had for years. I started as a li
feline to her son; somewhere along the way I became her daughter. Rose knew where to place nine different pieces of silverware at a single table setting and exactly how much to discreetly tip the service people who helped her with domestic tasks large and small. I had grown up in dingy rentals and didn’t learn it was proper to pass the salt and pepper together until I was already out of college; I still had no idea what to do with all those forks. No surprise, it had taken Rose and me several years to warm to each other. But after my own mother died when I was thirty-four, I had readily accepted Rose as the next best thing.

  I wedged the phone between my chin and shoulder. “Hi, Rose. How’s life at Mountainview Manor?” I asked, referring to the inexplicably named assisted living facility on Chicago’s north side, which was ninety miles from the nearest mountain but offered a clear view of Lake Michigan.

  Rose sniffed. “This place makes me want to stockpile antidepressants.”

  “I thought you were only taking vitamin D?” I asked.

  “I know where to find pills if I need them. Larry over in 14-B is sweet on me.”

  Through the kitchen window, the leaves on the trees resembled an autumnal rainbow. I must have been gazing at them for a while, because Rose said, “Maggie? Maggie, are you still there?”

  “Yes, Rose. I’m here. Sorry.”

  “I asked how you were doing. And don’t gussy it up on my behalf. Tell me the truth.”

  The truth was that no sleeping pill could prevent me from waking most nights around three, remembering that half of the bed Adam and I had shared was empty, and wandering around the house until five or so, when I passed out on the sofa or Zoe’s old daybed. The truth was that I sometimes wondered how long it would take for someone to realize I was missing if I were to walk into Lake Michigan with a few large rocks in my coat pockets. That when I was at work or grocery shopping or otherwise following the routines that predated Adam’s departure, I sometimes pretended nothing had changed. And each time I arrived home to an empty house, it was as though my life had just been demolished anew.

  “I’m okay,” I said to Rose. “I’m getting through it.”

  “All right. You know I’m not one to push.” She paused. “Have you seen Adam?”

  “No.” I had driven past his law office a couple times, hoping to catch a glimpse of him and maybe even Jillian, heading out for coffee or a midday tryst. (No such luck.) I had technically seen him during a meeting with our lawyers, which had become awkward after I insisted that there was no reason for us to meet when we had not both agreed to a divorce. To Adam’s credit, he’d had the wherewithal to look sheepish, but then I’d made the mistake of asking him where Jillian was, and his face had turned red. Our lawyers had exchanged knowing looks and rushed through the rest of the meeting. “Have you?”

  “In fact I have,” said Rose. “He came for a visit the other day.”

  I watched a well-fed squirrel chase a smaller squirrel around the base of the oak tree in the yard. “Did he bring his girlfriend?” I hated that I was weak enough to ask this, knowing that against her better judgment Rose would tell me if he had. But I could not stop thinking about Jillian Smith and how she was probably offering up her supple body to my husband at that very moment.

  Not that I actually knew what Adam’s paramour looked like. Of course, I had Googled her the same day Adam left, but my search had been as confusing as it had been comprehensive. There were half a dozen Jillian Smiths in the greater Chicago area, at least three of whom were around thirty. Two worked fairly close to Adam’s office in the West Loop and therefore could have bumped into him at his favorite coffee shop. Was he making sweet love to the curvy blond marketing professional who liked posing for duck-faced pictures with her parents’ aging Maltese—or the slim, glamorous public policy advocate who didn’t appear to have a social media presence outside of LinkedIn? Did I even want to know?

  (Of course I did.)

  Rose sighed. “Oh, Maggie.” I waited for her to continue, but there was an extended silence on the other end.

  “Rose? Are you there?”

  “What’s that? What were you saying?”

  My heart gave a little lurch; Rose was having more and more of these moments lately, and while any one was innocuous enough, their sum total pointed to a future in which she would no longer be fully present. And yet I pushed on, which suggested I was the one whose neurons weren’t firing at full speed. “I was asking if Adam brought his girlfriend.”

  “Now, Maggie, we both know he wouldn’t dare. You’re the mother of my grandchildren. I won’t tolerate such impropriety.”

  I found myself tearing up. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

  “Don’t thank me. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

  I wiped my eyes even as my mind wandered back to the elusive Jillian. Yes, it had to be the brunette public policy advocate who had stolen his heart. Although Adam had given up his dream job of being a public defender even before we had children and took on a sizable mortgage in a town with astronomical property taxes, I still thought of him as a Robin Hood at heart. We used to spend hours talking about politics and social justice, though eventually these topics gave way to our children’s lives and how to spend our retirement.

  But Jillian Smith, Yale BA (’08), Duke MPP (’11), was surely riveted by Adam’s fresh, enlightened take on inequality—while Adam was no doubt riveted by her flat stomach and pert breasts, which hung in their original position because she had not birthed two small humans, or so I was assuming. Regardless, I did not need to see Jillian in the flesh to know Adam had no problem getting aroused with her.

  The doorbell rang, pulling me out of my mental cave. “Rose? I have to run. I’ll call you in a few days,” I said, knowing full well she would beat me to it.

  “You take care of yourself, Maggie. And come see me soon.”

  “I will, Rose. Promise.”

  Linnea, my Realtor, was standing on the porch with a clipboard in hand. Linnea and I weren’t friends, per se, but we had known each other for roughly a million years and had survived a particularly brutal stint on the PTO together. She had heard about Adam leaving from every other person in town and offered to do me a favor by charging only half her standard commission on the condition that I leave glowing reviews on a variety of social media platforms, most of which I had never heard of. “Remind me to talk to you about curb appeal,” she said by way of a greeting.

  “Can’t wait,” I said as she marched through the door.

  The house had to go. We had moved in twenty-four years earlier; it should have been nearly paid off. But we had remortgaged during the early aughts when Adam was setting up his own law practice, and we still had an ample monthly payment. I was employed, but on a part-time basis, balancing the books and doing the odd secretarial task for a local dentist. What I made each month was enough to cover hygienic essentials and groceries—not the ownership and upkeep of a large house. I was receiving temporary support and would get alimony after the divorce was finalized. Moreover, Adam had agreed to pay for my health care premiums through the end of the following calendar year. However, unless I wanted to fork my entire monthly check over to the mortgage company, a much smaller home was in my immediate future.

  It’s not like I thought I’d die in the place; Adam and I were going to sell after Rose had lived with us for a few years and we were ready to retire, or at least slow down our (i.e., Adam’s) pace. But I wasn’t ready to rush that plan. Just because Adam was done with our life didn’t mean I was.

  “The place is spacious, but it’s a bit . . . dated,” said Linnea as she strolled through the hallway into the dining room.

  Our house was one of those brick and aluminum-sided cul-de-sac numbers that was last considered stylish when I was a teenager, which is to say long ago. But it reminded me of the Brady Bunch house, and as the only child of a single mom who usually worked two jobs to make ends meet, that house and its residents had been the stuff of my dreams. Though Adam and I had two c
hildren, not six, and I had usually played the role of Alice rather than Carol, our door was always open and our home was happy and full.

  Adam hadn’t cared about the house itself one way or the other. He wanted it because it was in the right neighborhood and boasted his idea of a perfect yard: immense, partially shaded, and abutting a wooded park where the local kids, including ours, liked to chug beer that had been stolen from various fridges, including ours. When we first moved in, Adam somehow believed that being a partner-track lawyer would still afford him enough free time to play ball with his kids. Instead, I learned to pitch and catch while encouraging our markedly unathletic children to be good sports. By the time Adam opened his own practice and could set his own hours, Zoe and Jack had already lost interest in softball and, to a lesser degree, their father.

  I followed Linnea’s gaze from the living room, with its worn beige carpet and pale peach walls, to the three-season room, which was decorated with a sagging sofa and a tiled coffee table. She was right, of course.

  “Nothing that can’t be fixed,” said Linnea, sensing my despair. “Rip up the carpet, have a painting crew come in, maybe . . .” Her eyes landed on the tired brown La-Z-Boy we had inherited from Adam’s father. Initially I had been certain Adam leaving it behind was a sign he intended to return. (How trusting I was! How tightly I clung to the hope that my husband would recall and uphold the vows he had made before God, a priest, and more than a hundred people, most of whom his parents had invited to our wedding and I have not seen since!) “Buy a few pieces of modern furniture to fill out the place,” she finished.