You Were There Too

by Colleen Oakley

  “FINLEY, STOP SPITTING ON YOUR BROTHER. So—unpacking?”

  “I’m working on it,” I say, even though I’m not. Not really. I keep meaning to unpack. Buy the things we need, like an entry table, but the choices are so overwhelming. Or maybe it’s the house that’s overwhelming. We lived in a shoebox for so long, I don’t know what to do with all this newfound space, or how to fill it. Ironic, considering I spent nearly my entire time in Philly working in an upscale furniture store, first in sales, then as a design consultant, helping clients pick out the perfect pieces and decide where to put them.

  Deep down, though, I know it’s not the space or the house that feels overwhelming, and suddenly I blurt out the one thing I’ve been terrified to admit—to myself, much less Harrison. “It doesn’t feel like this is where I’m supposed to be.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “I don’t know—I can’t explain it. But I keep thinking at any second we’re going to drive back to Philly. That our apartment is still waiting for us. That we’re going to go home.”

  “I think that’s normal. You guys lived there for what—seven years? And honestly, Mia,” she says, gently, “you’ve never handled change well.” I know she’s referring to Mom and Dad’s divorce. How I cried myself to sleep for months. Started wetting the bed at age eleven. And then at Christmas, convinced myself that Mom was coming back. That it was going to be our big gift that year. Needless to say, it was a disappointing holiday.

  “NO, FINLEY! YOU JUST HAD A SQUEEZY YOGURT. NO MORE SNACKS. And remember—you’ve got all those pregnancy hormones rushing through your body. They can make you feel crazy. Hang in there. I’m sure once you get settled, and when the baby comes, everything will be different. Better. You’ll see.”

  My gaze drifts back to the vegetable garden and the yellow-spotted tomato plants. I sigh. It’s sensible advice, which is the only kind Vivian gives. And though I hate it when she’s right, this time I really do hope she is.

  * * *

  There are only seven tomato plants at the True Value—six of them have little green orbs of fruit weighing down the stems and the seventh’s leaves are yellowed and hangdog like the ones in my garden. I gently rub a leaf of the pitiful one between my finger and thumb, wondering if it has the same affliction.

  “Epsom salt,” says a gravelly voice behind me.

  Instead of the man I expect to see, my eyes meet those of a gray-bouffanted woman. She’s tall and thin, with wrinkles of skin gathered at her jowls. Underneath her red apron is a flowery blouse open at the neck, where a thick necklace of shiny blue beads rests in her clavicle. Her name tag reads: Jules.

  “Excuse me?” I ask, unsure if she was speaking to me, even though she’s looking right at me.

  She gestures to the plant I’m holding. “Soil’s probably got a magnesium deficiency. Epsom salt can help. It’s not a lack of water, because it’s been getting the same amount as these others. And I don’t think it’s fungal—no black spots on the leaves.”

  She glances back at the cash register where a man with a thick neck and even thicker hands is counting change for a customer. Then she ducks her head closer to me, so close that I can smell the sourness of her breath. “Marty will probably give it to you for free, if you buy a couple of these others. It’s past planting season and he wants to get rid of ’em.”

  “Oh, I already have tomato plants,” I say. “But they all look like this one. I was hoping to get some advice.”

  “Mm,” she grunts. “Epsom salt,” she repeats. “We don’t sell it here, though. You’ll have to head over to the Giant.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  She nods and turns to go.

  “Wait,” I say, wishing I could download all the information from her head into mine somehow. I was so naive in thinking that taking care of a garden would be simple—that the hard part of planting was already done and in a few months I would be harvesting waxy purple eggplants (if there are even eggplants in the garden—I can’t tell what half of the vegetation is) and big plump tomatoes that Harrison could turn into spaghetti sauce or salsa or whatever else you can make with tomatoes.

  She looks back at me, patient. “Yes?”

  “Do you guys have a service—like people that will come out and do garden care or something? I’m new to all of this and not quite sure what I’m doing.”

  “You want a lawn service?”

  “I mean, I don’t need my lawn mowed or anything—” Although, on second thought that might be nice, too. Harrison can barely keep up with how fast the grass grows and it takes him two hours to do the back on the riding lawnmower he bought when we moved in. I offered to do it, but he cited my delicate condition and I didn’t argue with him. Mostly because I didn’t really want to mow the lawn.

  “Well, we don’t do that anyway,” she says. “You’ll have to call a landscape company. We do have garden classes, though, once a month. May was on crop rotation, but there’s another this Saturday. I think it’s summer annuals, but I’d have to check.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and she leaves me alone with the pitiful plant. It’s so dejected looking, I almost can’t bear to leave it, knowing no one else will buy it in its condition. Bleeding heart. I can hear Harrison’s voice in my ear and the way he makes fun of me every time I bring home something that’s been abandoned—the futon was one such thing, left on the corner of my block; a cat I found on Sansom Street that turned out to be more feral than stray; a pink, child-size mitten left behind on a seat of a bus. I should have left that one—what if someone came looking for it, I wondered later with a pang—but in the moment, it looked so lonely, so vulnerable without its match, I couldn’t bear it. Harrison just stared at me, eyebrows heavenward, for what felt like a full twenty-four hours after I explained it to him.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, as I walk through the sliding glass doors of the Giant to buy Epsom salt, I remember Harrison saying that morning we had one spoonful of coffee left.

  I pick up a basket and hook it over my arm, then head to the coffee and cereal aisle, where I stand surveying the different flavors—medium roast, Colombian, hazelnut, French vanilla—even though I’ll get the Folgers breakfast blend, like always. And then the yeasty smell of baking bread draws me to the bakery and I tuck a still-warm loaf of ciabatta into my basket. I stroll through the aisles and grocery shop the way that drives Harrison crazy—no list, just picking up things that appeal to me. Today, I choose a hunk of Gruyère, a tub of silky mozzarella rounds, tomatoes, a bag of Cheetos and a foam tray of triangled watermelon.

  I walk toward the checkout and have that niggling feeling there’s something I’m forgetting. And then like a flash it comes to me—Epsom salt. Of course. The actual reason I came to the Giant in the first place. It’s from moments like this, I’m convinced “pregnancy brain” is a real affliction.

  The salt isn’t anywhere to be found near the table salt and seasonings and I have to ask two different stock boys before I finally find it lurking with the health and beauty products. The only size they carry is a twenty-five-pound bag and I heft it up into the crook of my arm.

  At the checkout line, I become engrossed in a tabloid cover speculating on the number of babies Princess Kate is currently carrying in her royal womb. Even though she’s probably not even pregnant, even though it’s uncharitable, I can’t help but think that she’s greedy. Doesn’t she already have three?

  The clerk rings up each item and hands me my receipt. I step to the end of the lane to collect my two plastic bags of groceries from a balding older man in a black apron, when the automatic glass door twenty yards away slides open, drawing my attention. A man walks into the store.

  I freeze. A cold electric current runs from the base of my skull down my spine. My heart thuds once and then stops.

  Maybe forever.

  It’s him. And then, as if I’ve willed him
to do it, he looks up, eyes locking with mine.

  “Ma’am?”

  I blink.

  Turn my head toward the balding man, who is holding out my twenty-five-pound bag of Epsom salt. “Oh. Right,” I say, before looking at the plastic bags of groceries I’m clutching in each hand. My mind a jumble, I futz about before finally shifting all the bags to one hand, so I can heft the salt back into the crook of my right arm.

  When I look back up at the door, no one is there.

  He’s gone.

  Like an apparition.

  A dream.

  Loaded down with my purchases, I hurry toward the door and then stop where he was standing and look toward the produce section and the aisles where he may have gone. My eyes scan various shoppers, but none of them are him.

  I’ve half a mind to take off into the store, going aisle by aisle until I find him, but then I give my head a firm shake. It couldn’t have been him. Obviously. He is a figment of my imagination. It was only someone that looked like him. I hear Vivian in my mind: All those pregnancy hormones can make you feel crazy.

  I have been out of sorts—forgetful, caught up in my thoughts. That must be what it is.

  Still, I glance around the store one last time before exiting through the doors, into the full-blast heat of the day.

  Chapter 3

  I’m eating a wedge of watermelon when I hear the front door open and shut. It’s not even five, too early for Harrison to be home, and I cock my head, my heart racing.

  When I hear the familiar sound of his keys hitting cardboard, his footfalls crossing the hardwood, relief courses through me, but it’s not until he actually appears at the doorway to the kitchen that I let out my breath.

  “You scared me.”

  “Didn’t you ask me to be home early?” he asks, shrugging out of his suit jacket and loosening the knot of his bow tie in one fluid motion.

  I stare at him blankly. “Wait—is it Friday?” I really am losing it. Or maybe that’s the problem with not having a job—all the days completely run together.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Raya’s coming!” I leap off the stool and throw myself at Harrison.

  He wraps his arms around me. “I’m gonna pretend all this enthusiasm is for me,” he says. “And, I’m going to start cooking, because even though Raya said she’s bringing dinner, we both know she’s going to forget.”

  “No, she won’t,” I say, smacking him on the arm. He reaches for a slice of watermelon and bites into it, a pink stream of juice running down his chin. He swipes it with the back of his hand. “Is the mime coming with her?”

  “Marcel’s a performance artist,” I say, chiding him.

  “He’s a mime.”

  I pause. “OK, he’s a mime.”

  “I can’t believe she’s still with him,” he says.

  “Well, better him than Jesse, right?”

  “True.”

  “And she really likes him, so you need to be nice.”

  “I’m always nice,” he says.

  “You are always nice,” I agree.

  “But I can’t promise I’m not going to roll my eyes if he quotes David Bowie again. I swear it was at least three times.”

  “Fair enough,” I say. “How was work? What was the middle-of-the-night emergency this time?”

  “Appendectomy,” he says, and his shoulders fall, as if he’s only now allowing the weight of it to sink in.

  I pause. Appendectomies are one of the most common—and easiest—surgeries Harrison does, next to gallbladders, but ever since he lost that eight-year-old boy in Philly during a routine appendectomy, they’ve been hard for him, emotionally. Not that he talks about it much. He tries to distance himself, to detach, as all doctors must if they are to survive the things they witness. But some patients, like Noah, inevitably get to him. He carries the weight of them around like rocks in his pockets. And I worry that one day he won’t be able to stand from the burden.

  “How’d it go?”

  “It was . . . interesting, actually. When the nurse did the ultrasound to confirm the appendicitis, she also confirmed a pregnancy.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “The woman didn’t know?”

  “She does now. I think she was quite surprised. Almost made her forget how much pain she was in.”

  “But everything turned out OK? I didn’t know a pregnant woman could have surgery.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugs. “Went in laparoscopically. It’s pretty low risk.”

  “Look at you. Saving two lives at once.” I bat my eyelashes at him. “My hero.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Anything else interesting happen today?”

  My mind flashes to the man I saw at the Giant. The man I thought was him. I consider telling Harrison. I do have a funny story, I would say, laughing. But is it funny? I think again about how I would feel if Harrison was having dreams about the same woman.

  “Nope,” I say. “I’m going to go change.”

  * * *

  “I thought we’d never make it,” Raya says as she sweeps past me into the foyer an hour later. “My cell reception was shit and we passed your driveway what—eight times?”

  “Yeah, it’s not marked well,” I say as I hug her. She smells like Raya, a mix of acrid chemicals—from the bright red dye she douses her hair with every few weeks—and peppermint essential oil.

  “Your hair’s grown out,” she says, fingering my black locks. I chopped it, my hair, on a whim after we lost the second baby. One morning I left the house with it swinging down to my midback, and by the time Harrison got home that night, it barely reached the bottom of my chin. A razor cut, the stylist called it, and I liked how raw it sounded. The edges jagged and sharp, like the way I felt.

  Marcel follows and I offer my cheek for him to kiss. Though he’s freshly showered, he still retains a faint metallic scent from the copper paint he coats himself with for his street performances. His tank top reveals arms covered in tattoos—a dragon breathing fire coils up his left side while M. C. Escher’s famous hand-drawing-a-hand, various flowers, and a skull with a mustache decorate the other. His dark hair is slicked back on both sides with an impressive amount of pomade.

  “Shit,” Raya says, as she’s embracing Harrison.

  “What?” We all look at her.

  “I was supposed to bring dinner, wasn’t I?”

  Harrison gives me a look over her head.

  “Oh well, we’ll order something,” she says, pulling out her phone and inspecting it. “Finally—I have one bar. What delivery app do you guys use?”

  I smirk. “Nothing delivers out here. Unless you want gas station pizza.” We ordered it once in a moment of desperation, and a greasy-haired teenager came out on his moped, delivering a cardboard box that contained what appeared to be a frozen grocery store pizza heated up under a hot lamp. Harrison thought it was hilarious, and I joined in laughing, but mostly to keep from crying.

  Raya’s face registers equal parts disgust and shock. “How are you surviving?”

  “She’s got me,” Harrison says. “Don’t worry, I’m sure I can find something to whip up.”

  Later, over grilled mozzarella and tomato sandwiches and red wine in the living room, Paul Simon sings about Graceland from the Bluetooth speaker as Raya regales us with stories from her day job as a tour bus guide in the city. I lean forward eagerly from my perch on the floor. Raya is funny and captivating and it’s been so long since I’ve seen her, I feel the need to drink her in while she’s here. When she’s exhausted her crazy-tourist stories, she starts catching me up on our art school friends.

  “Did you hear about Prisha?” Prisha Khanna was a year ahead of us, and by far the most commercially successful artist to come out of our time at Moore. A photographer, her provocative portraits of women have been part of a traveling exhibition in museums
worldwide. I’ve never been particularly drawn to her work, but it was at the opening night of her first showcase at a small gallery in Center City that I met Harrison. For that alone, I’m happy for her success.

  “The exhibit’s coming to Philly.”

  “Really? Which museum?”

  “The museum. Philadelphia.”

  “What? Wow,” I say.

  “I know! And some big celebrity bought one of her photos. I can’t remember now—Taylor Swift, maybe? Anyway, she’s big-time—that’s why she’s a finalist for Moore’s Visionary Woman Awards.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it was in the newsletter. The gala’s in September. I’ll grab us tickets.”

  I make a noise that I hope sounds interested. Just because I’m happy for her doesn’t mean I’m not also a little jealous. I try to swallow it down with a sip of water.

  “Oh, and Fletcher. You know how she was always collecting those old lamps from flea markets, but wasn’t sure what she was going to end up doing with them?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Well, they’re an exhibit now—all fifty-six of them crammed into a room in a gallery on Arch Street.”

  “Like a light installation?”

  “No, that’s the thing—she put new bulbs in them, but didn’t plug any of them in.” She grins. “She’s calling it: Potential.”

  I laugh. “Sounds like Fletcher.”

  “Sounds more like Chris Burden, if you ask me,” says Marcel. He’s eaten around the edges of his sandwich like a bird, and he places it back on the plate in his lap.

  “Who?” asks Harrison.

  “The Urban Light guy?” Marcel says.

  Harrison’s face remains blank.

  “Artist out in California,” I say. “He installed, like, two hundred vintage streetlamps in rows in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.”