I stare at him, stunned. I know I should say he’s not a disappointment, that I’m not disappointed. But the truth is, I am. Devastated, really. And we both know it.
When he speaks again, his voice is softer, sad. “I feel like we’re just living in this limbo, and neither one of us wants to say it. I know you’re waiting for me to change my mind. To change. And I’m not going to.”
“So what are you saying?” I ask, a lump forming in my throat.
“I’m just saying,” he says, then pauses. “I think we both need some time.” The silence stretches between us. And then he stands up and grabs his duffel bag.
“You’re leaving now?” My back stiffens. “I thought you were going running.”
“I should get on the road. It’s a long drive.”
“OK,” I say, desperation crawling up my throat. The reality of what’s happening hitting me at once. I watch in disbelief as he walks toward me. He lifts my chin, kisses me lightly on the mouth. “Dios Mia,” he whispers, his breath tickling the skin above my lip.
He leaves, first our bedroom and then the house, the door clicking shut behind him. I just continue to stand there, mute, numb, stunned. A Rodin sculpture of myself: Girl Whose Husband Is Leaving Her.
Chapter 23
I always thought if my marriage ended it would be an explosion—a fiery blast of fighting and screaming, a plate of spaghetti thrown against a wall. The way my parents ended things. I didn’t know it could end in a trickle. A pipe under the sink dripping unnoticed until one day the entire thing crashes through the water-damaged floor.
Is that what’s happening? Is my marriage ending? Did the sink already crash through the floor, or is there still time to fix the pipe?
People change, Harrison said to me months ago.
He was right this morning when he said all I’ve been doing is waiting for him to change back. Like he’s a fifth-grade science experiment. Water that turns from a solid to a liquid—and then back to a solid. But now I think he’s more like a piece of paper that’s been ripped into a thousand pieces. You can tape it back together, but it will never be what it once was.
And maybe it is selfish, but if this is who Harrison is now, where does that leave us? Me?
After I pull myself from the bed, I pad around the house, going through motions—eating a yogurt, doing a load of laundry, washing dishes—anything to occupy my mind. Later, when I can think of nothing else to do, I turn on the TV, but the noise grates, so I put it on mute and just stare at the screen, where Steve Harvey silently guffaws at two feuding families. But over time, the silence becomes overwhelming. A constant reminder that my husband is gone.
It’s funny—in Philadelphia, our apartment was too tiny for one person, let alone two, and whenever I found myself alone in it, I secretly cherished the solitude. The freedom to eat a cheese stick, and then a candy bar, and then a few red pepper strips with hummus, and then a bowl of leftover pasta without him gently ribbing me about my odd snacking habits. Or the ability to watch one of my game shows or blast Fleetwood Mac at full volume, without the fear that it would interrupt his intense concentration over medical journals or textbooks.
Now, here—even though he hasn’t even been gone an hour—I just feel lonely.
Vivian calls at some point, my cell chiming on the trunk in front of me, but I can’t bring myself to talk to her, to anyone, right now, so I flip the sound off and toss it to the floor.
I lie down, my head on the armrest of the couch, and when my eyes grow heavy I let them close, grateful for the respite of sleep.
* * *
Later I wake with a start and blink, foggy from sleep. I slowly sit up on the couch and take inventory of my surroundings. Judging by the light streaming through the window above the television, it’s late morning, not even noon. And then I hear it, footsteps coming up the walk. It was a car door slamming shut—that was what woke me. I stand up now and rush to the front door. It’s Harrison. I know it is. He came back. He’s going to wrap me in his embrace, ask me to come with him, tell me we’ll work it all out. I’m nearly crying with relief when I reach the door and throw it open.
The world around me stills.
It’s not Harrison.
It’s Oliver.
I blink. “Hi,” I breathe, startled. But also wildly confused at the competing emotions circling each other inside me. Disappointment that it’s not Harrison, yet a fluttery buzz in my stomach that, if I’m being honest, isn’t just from the unexpected surprise.
“I’ve been trying to call you,” he says, and I hear the undertone of desperation. He looks tired, as tired as I feel from my interrupted nap, my emotional morning.
I glance back inside. “Oh, I turned my ringer off.”
“Do you know Beau Hartman?”
“What?” I say.
He digs his phone out of his pocket, scrolls through it and then holds the screen up to me. It’s a picture of a picture. A photo of me. Wearing a seafoam dress and holding a sparkler, the orange reflecting in my eyes. I take the phone from him, the hair on the back of my neck standing up. And it dawns on me. Beau, as in Beau and Annie. “I was at his wedding.”
“You were at his wedding.”
My heart thrums. Beau and Annie. We were at his wedding, Harrison and I. “How did you get this?”
Oliver swipes a hand over his face and exhales as if he’s not sure where to start.
“Can I come in?”
“Oh—yeah. Of course.” I step aside and Oliver walks past me into the living room. He sits heavily on the new leather club chair and rubs his face again, this time with both hands. I return to my spot on the sofa and watch him, waiting.
Finally, he looks up. “Beau’s my best friend. He’s getting a divorce. He’s been pretty messed up over it and I’ve just been trying to be there for him. Last night, I was over at the apartment he’s been subletting on the west side. It was only five and he was already a bottle deep in gin, crying and looking through his wedding album. He was pretty incoherent and there wasn’t much I could do but look through it with him. And that’s when I saw you.”
My eyes dart to his. It was a large wedding—more than four hundred people—but even in my alcohol-induced haze, I still feel like I would have noticed him if he’d been there. “So were you—”
“No. I was in Peru. I had a flight back for it, but there were mechanical issues and I ended up sitting on the tarmac for seven hours. By the time they canceled it and rebooked me for the next day, it was too late.”
“But you were supposed to be there.”
“I was supposed to be there,” he agrees.
I chew my lip, trying to push the shock aside, to swallow my anxiety, to analyze this information logically, but it doesn’t feel like there’s anything logical about it. I stare at the floor, at my bare feet, and notice that if I moved my left one three inches forward, it would brush up against his. I don’t know why I notice this. Or why I so desperately want to move my foot forward three inches.
Focus.
Oliver.
Beau and Annie’s wedding.
It feels like we’ve been playing that game six degrees of separation (Surely we know each other. We must, right?) and finally found a connection—for all the good it does us. “I mean, I don’t know Beau,” I say. “We were invited to that wedding on a whim.”
Oliver nods as if he assumed as much, but he’s eyeing me intensely. “Have you ever heard that saying, I think it was Yogi Berra: This is too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence?”
I haven’t, but as soon as he says it, I shudder, my skin breaking out in gooseflesh. And I know exactly what he means. That’s what all of this has felt like, from the first time I laid eyes on him.
“Maybe it is just a coincidence,” I offer lamely, but I know it’s not. Because that wouldn’t explain why the same strange sensation pools in my
gut, the one that gripped me in the dank basement of the psychic. He give you baby. It wasn’t just the words that rattled me, it was the conviction with which Isak said them—as if everything was already written in stone, inevitable, a train in motion, and I didn’t have access to the brakes.
I realize Oliver’s still talking. “And I keep having that nightmare. The amusement park. It’s worse each time and I can’t get it out of my head. It’s awful.” I peer at him, noticing the bags under his eyes, how he doesn’t look just tired, but like he hasn’t slept in days. “And that book. I can’t stop thinking about that book,” he mumbles. And suddenly he’s talking about quantum physics.
I open my mouth to tell him I’ve been having trouble sleeping, too. That the dreams are awful. To ask him why the hell he’s talking about quantum physics. But what comes out instead is: “I can’t do this right now.”
“What?” Oliver’s eyes meet mine.
“I can’t do this,” I repeat, but this time I leave off the “right now.”
“But—” He leans toward me, confusion clouding his face. “But it feels like we’re getting closer.”
And I know he means to the answer, but it’s not what he said, and that’s the problem. I love my husband. I love Harrison, or I loved the Harrison he used to be? All I know for sure is that I’m hurt and raw, but mostly I’m confused, because I have feelings for Oliver, too. I don’t know what they are or what it means, but I know that I’m standing on a precipice with him in this room and if I take a step—if I move my foot three inches forward to brush against his, there’s no turning back.
I can’t get any closer. I’m too close already. I lean back, away from him, before we do touch, before I can change my mind.
“I’m sorry,” I say and stand up. “This is all . . . so much. And I need time. To think. I can’t see anything clearly.”
“Yeah,” Oliver says slowly. “OK.” I can feel his eyes on me, but I find that I can’t meet his gaze. Or allow myself to wonder why it feels like I’m breaking up with him.
Or why it feels like part of me doesn’t want to.
* * *
Somehow, I make it through my art class that evening with a plastered-on smile and ever-widening eyes to prevent tears from forming. It takes me longer than usual to wash out the brushes, stack the easels, recap the paints. I’m still working when a man enters the room in blue coveralls with a broom in one hand and a large black trash bag in the other. The janitor. We exchange hellos and both go about our own duties in silence. I’m too absorbed in my own thoughts to carry on a conversation with a stranger.
As promised, Harrison texted that afternoon when he arrived at his parents’ house, just outside of Buffalo. I typed and deleted a thousand messages before finally settling on OK. Then I alternated between draping myself on the couch and the bed, my emotions changing by the hour. Harrison. Oliver. Dreams. Beau’s wedding album. Babies. I was right about only one thing: It’s all too much, and I don’t know where or how to begin processing any of it.
“Nice painting.”
“Huh?” I look up to see the janitor studying the amusement park that I have yet to retrieve from the easel. “Oh. Thank you.”
“It’s yours?”
I nod.
“Lake Cedar, eh?” says the man. “You from there?” I’m sluggish, a step behind, exhausted from the myriad events of the day, and it takes me a minute to comprehend what he’s said. “What?”
“That’s Lake Cedar Amusement Park in Altoona, right?” he says.
My heartbeat picks up as I come fully back to myself, the room, his words. “You recognize it?”
“Of course. I grew up there. Went every summer.”
“Are you sure?”
“That I went every summer?” He scratches the thin yellowing hair on his head. “Might have missed one or two, I guess, but for the most part—”
“No, I mean are you sure it’s Lake Cedar?”
He squints at the painting. “Well yeah, it’s got the giraffe and the dolphin on the carousel. Used to fight with my brother over that one. And then the lights of that ring toss game right next to it. The Tilt-A-Whirl. Threw up once on that, matter of fact. Had a belly full of Dr Pepper and funnel cake.”
I stare at him, my heart hammering now.
“Wait, why are you asking why I’m sure?” He narrows his eyes at me. “Didn’t you paint it?”
“Yes, I just—”
“So don’t you know what you painted?”
I look from him to the painting, then back to him. “No,” I say, honestly. “I didn’t.”
But I wonder if I do now.
Chapter 24
That night I lie wide awake in bed, my mind still a jumble, one thought knocking up against another, all stemming from the same three main subjects:
Harrison.
Oliver.
Lake Cedar.
I couldn’t find much about the park online—no pictures—only a brief entry in Wikipedia acknowledging its distinct honor of being home to the world’s oldest roller coaster, Leap-the-Dips, now a national historic landmark. I’m not sure what I was hoping to find, maybe something that would jog a memory, make me say, “Aha! Of course.” But I’ve never been to Altoona, not that I remember, anyway.
Part of me wanted to text Oliver, but it felt like a can of worms I wasn’t ready to open back up, especially considering the limbo of my marriage.
And that’s when I remember the book. I sit up and turn on the light, squinting against the sudden brightness. Sliding open the drawer of my nightstand, I pick it up, rereading the title: Psychic Psychology: The Science Behind the Supernatural.
I flip to the table of contents, scanning until I come to a chapter titled, helpfully, “Visions, Dreams and Prophecies.” Turning to the requisite page, I scan the first couple of sentences and paragraphs, not finding anything that makes sense to me. It’s not until page ninety-seven that two words jump out at me: Abraham Lincoln.
Again, with the president? And then two more jump out: quantum physics.
This must be what Oliver had been talking about.
While some dreams are purely imagination, or inconsequential, precognitive dreams, like Lincoln’s, are tapping into another time and space. How is that possible? Two words: quantum physics. We often think of time as an arrow, a straight line: past, present, future. But quantum physics views time as another dimension, like space. There’s up, down, east, west—it’s more than bidirectional. And if you think of time that way, the future already exists. It’s just that our brains allow us to focus only on the here and now—just like you can see only the little patch of earth where you’re standing, even though an entire world exists outside of it. Many Native American cultures understand this intuitively. They view time as a circle, where everything is happening all at once. For them it’s no surprise that you can dream about the future.
I read the paragraph again. And then a third time, trying to understand. The future already exists? It sounds crazy, like something Raya would say. I keep reading anyway, until the lines blur together and my eyes grow heavy.
* * *
In the morning I wake up to the sunlight painting the room yellow, rather than the incessant blaring of Harrison’s alarm, which in other circumstances might be pleasant, but today only underlines the fact that he’s not here. I picture him, waking up next to me. His body warm against mine, his skin smelling like sleep, edged with the lingering scent of his piney deodorant. He would sit on his side of the bed, shoulders hunched, collecting himself, and then stretch, groaning lightly, his long arms reaching toward the ceiling.
Then he would stuff his feet into his sneakers and go running.
All that running. Miles and miles of running. And for what?
My cell alerts me to a text message. Raya.
What time are you coming on Saturday?
; My eyes feel gritty with sleep. I rub one of them and yawn. What?
Visionary Woman Awards. Did you forget?
The event at my alma mater honoring Prisha. I did forget. And I don’t want to go. In college, I always thought I would one day be a recipient of Moore’s distinguished Visionary Woman Award. I suppose every undergrad there thinks that. But it doesn’t sink in until this moment how much I really believed it—and how my career is so far off track that it’s unlikely to ever happen. Then my cell rings and I know it’s Raya impatient for my response.
I slide my finger over it, without glancing at the screen.
“Geez, I was about to text you back.”
“Mia?”
“Oh.” It’s Vivian. And at the sound of her voice, I start crying.
“Mia?” she says again, her voice now filled with alarm. “What’s wrong?”
“Harrison left me,” I say, and then my tears bubble over, drowning out anything else I might say.
“What?”
When I calm down, Vivian listens patiently as I explain.
“Honey, it’s just to help after his dad’s surgery—it’s temporary, right? He’ll be back.”
“I don’t know,” I say, unsure of anything anymore. “Do you think I’m selfish?”
“No, I think you’re human. And I think you really want a baby.”
“I really want a baby,” I agree, through tears falling anew. And then I give voice to my other greatest fear. “What if I’m just like Mom? What if it’s genetic?”
“What if what’s genetic?”
Cheating, I want to say, but I haven’t told Vivian anything about Oliver, and I can’t bring myself to tell her now, so I go with: “Being terrible at marriage?”
“Oh, Mia,” she says. “Everyone’s terrible at it. Marriage is hard.”
You Were There Too Page 23