You Were There Too

by Colleen Oakley

  Caught off guard by his response, I chirped back: “What do you want to bet?”

  He could have shrugged it off as rhetorical, but he didn’t miss a beat. “If you get married, you have to get a tattoo.” It was a nod to an earlier conversation in the evening, when we were swapping dumb things we had done as teenagers: “I almost got a tattoo once,” I told him. “But fortunately I was too drunk and the manager kicked me out.”

  “Why fortunately?” he asked.

  “It was going to be one of those god-awful Chinese characters that everyone thought made them seem so cultured and enlightened, when it really only makes you look like a fool.”

  “What was yours going to say?”

  “I don’t know. The symbol for creativity or something equally cheesy. Although, I don’t read Chinese, so how do I know that’s what it actually meant? It could have just as easily been the symbol for ‘sweatpants’ or something.”

  Harrison poured the dregs of the pitcher of sangria into our glasses and eyed me. “Do we have a deal?”

  I grinned cheekily. “Only if you promise to get one, too.”

  He asked me to marry him for the first time two months later. Caught off guard, I laughed, and said no. Then, and the next five times, sticking to my guns. I didn’t believe in marriage. But as the weeks and months passed, I became less sure of my hardline stance. Maybe it didn’t work for my parents, but this was Harrison. I’d only known him a short time, but the memories of what my life had been before him had started to blur at the edges. And I knew—even though it was cliché and cringe-worthy and everything I had never believed in—I couldn’t picture a day of my life without him. I didn’t want to. And I knew what I needed to do.

  One afternoon, ten months into our relationship, I entered the door of our apartment, breathless. “Ask me again,” I said, my arms crossed behind my back, a slick of sweat on my forehead. Harrison was standing at the open refrigerator drinking orange juice from the carton. His eyes were bloodshot, having come off a twenty-four-hour shift. “Ask you what?” he said, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

  “Just ask me,” I said, grinning like mad.

  He tilted his head, and I could see the dawning in his eyes. I nodded, egging him on. He set the carton back on the shelf and let the fridge door swing shut, then eyed me.

  “Will you marry me?” he said. Instead of responding, I raised my left arm, slowly turning it toward him, showing him the inside of my wrist, where the skin swelled painfully red around not one, but a string of three freshly inked Chinese characters.

  His mouth dropped open. “You didn’t,” he said.

  “I did.”

  “What does it say?”

  My eye caught the light and I smiled. “Sweatpants.”

  * * *

  Standing in the sunporch of his mother’s house now, I wait for Harrison’s response to my declaration, but his eyes remain blank, and the seed of doubt blossoms in my belly. Have I made the right choice? I was being honest when I told Oliver I had feelings for him. And maybe our life together would be everything—travel and adventure and babies. Or maybe we’d fight constantly. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to have babies, either. It’s impossible to know what the future could hold.

  And so I have to live in the what-is and not in the what-could-be.

  And right now, in this moment, I love Harrison. And whether he wants to admit it or not, he needs me. And I won’t give up on him. Not yet.

  I take a tentative step forward. “I know that I’ll never understand what you’re going through,” I say quietly. “But you don’t have to go through it alone. I won’t let you. I can’t.”

  He turns now, away from me. He stares at Jane Pauley and I wonder if this is it. If he’s going to tell me to leave.

  But he doesn’t say anything. He just lifts up the blanket he’s lying under, and I take it for the cue that it is, before he changes his mind. I slide onto the cushion, sidling up next to him, inhaling his piney deodorant, inhaling him. I lay my head on his chest and lace my fingers into his left hand, around his ring finger where I know, beneath his wedding band, he has one tiny word tattooed: MIA.

  * * *

  When his father wakes up, Harrison helps move him to the recliner in the sunroom and I spend the afternoon letting Del order me around with household chores. She doesn’t let me cook, but I am able to deliver food to the guys as they stare at golf, both dozing on and off until dinner.

  That night, Harrison and I lie in the double bed in his childhood bedroom, his feet dangling off the end, his trumpet case still on the dresser where we left it years ago.

  “Do you know the worst part?” Harrison whispers into the still night air.

  I turn slightly toward him.

  “It’s not his mother’s screams or the sound of the machine flatlining or anything like that. It’s these little thoughts that catch me out of nowhere—these mundane everyday actions that the living perform and the dead do not. Like eating a banana or watching golf or feeling the sun’s rays warm on your arms. Noah will never do any of those things. Not anymore. And it’s my fault.”

  “Oh, Harrison,” I breathe. And then we lie there in silence again, me trying to think of something, anything to say that can make him feel better, that can ease his pain. And then I remember a blog post I read, “8 Things to Say to Someone Who’s Grieving,” and one of them was to share a similar story of your own.

  “Did I ever tell you about the salamander?” I say, my voice soft, quiet. We’re both staring at the popcorn ceiling now. “We caught one once, me and Viv, in the backyard. And she told me how their tails grow back if they lose them. So I put the salamander in a shoebox and got a little plastic shovel out of the garage. And I cut its tail off. I ran back a couple hours later so excited to see its brand-new tail, but it didn’t have one.” I pause. “It was dead. I was so distraught, I cried for four days straight.”

  The story hangs in the air and telling it dredges up all the guilt and sadness I felt.

  “Mia,” Harrison says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you trying to compare killing a lizard to killing a child?”

  When he puts it like that, it sounds stupid.

  “No! No, I . . .” I say. And then: “Yeah. I was.”

  And now that I think about it, that article might have been “8 Things NOT to Say to Someone Who’s Grieving.”

  “Wow,” he says.

  We lie there, me berating myself, until I suddenly feel the bed gently shaking and then it grows stronger and I realize it’s Harrison’s shoulders. I look over to see that he’s laughing. Hysterically.

  “Harrison?”

  “You know . . .” he chokes out between guffaws, “for a sensitive artist type . . . you’re appallingly . . . bad at this.”

  And then the laughter turns into tears, and this, I understand.

  I wrap myself around him, my arms and legs like octopus tentacles, trying to hold him together, while he’s falling apart. Harrison tilts his head toward mine. And we sit there, connected temple to temple, until it feels like we are one—I inhale and his lungs fill up with oxygen.

  Later, when he’s spent and near sleep, I remember what his mom said when I showed up that morning. “Hey,” I whisper, propping up on one elbow to face him.

  “Hm?”

  “What does Te tomó bastante tiempo mean?” I ask, recalling his mother’s words to me on the porch.

  He pauses, calculating the translation to English. “Took you long enough.”

  I close my eyes and tilt my head back in understanding. I think of the babies we lost. I think of Oliver. I think of how long Harrison has been hurting. I don’t know if he will ever not be hurting. If he will ever recover—if our relationship will survive. But in that moment, I do know one thing for sure. I open my eyes and look right at Harrison. “No. It took me too
long.”

  Chapter 27

  Harrison goes back to work the first week of October.

  It took a lot of long, meandering conversations and prodding in the weeks after we returned from his parents’ house, but he finally reached out to one of his professors from Emory, who has been talking to him via phone and email. He hasn’t said much about their conversations, but curiosity compelled me to ask to read one.

  We all make mistakes. There is no surgeon alive that won’t do something dumb that causes the loss of a life. Every procedure, by nature, is a risk. Human error is one of those risks—but should one patient’s death keep you from saving other lives? You are an excellent doctor, Harrison, and this may sound like tough love, but not only do I think you should move forward in your career, you have an obligation to do so. You have the skill and potential to save many lives, and one devastating mistake doesn’t absolve you of living up to that responsibility.

  I think that one in particular helped, because one week he was talking about maybe quitting medicine altogether and doing something stress-free like opening a running-gear store or going to culinary school and the next he got up one morning, put on his shirt and bow tie and went in to the hospital.

  He still walks heavy, shoulders hunched, the pain, though maybe a touch lighter than it once was, still weighing him down. And I catch him at times, in private moments, holding a jar of spaghetti sauce or frozen in midtie of his shoe or staring out the window at nothing. And I know he’s thinking about Noah. I know he’ll always think about Noah, that he’ll never forget. But I so hope he can forgive.

  * * *

  The second week in October, I stand at the edge of the garden, staring at a row of tall green heads of romaine lettuce. I should be filled with pride at my gardening victory, but all I can think about is Oliver. I want to call him, boast to him about my accomplishment. But I won’t. I think instead of the letter I left along with his suit jacket on Caroline’s front porch the morning I drove to Buffalo. I try to picture him reading it—his face as understanding dawns at my words. That I didn’t know what the intersection of our lives meant, but that I couldn’t dwell on it any longer. That I couldn’t reside in the unknown. I love my husband, I wrote, and though of that I was certain, of everything else, in the weeks since I left the letter, I was less so.

  I still wonder; I can’t help it. Every morning I wake up from a vivid dream of him. Or in the middle of a sleepless night, when the words Isak said crawl into my mind and linger like a broken record without an off switch: He give you baby. Or every time I pass a pregnant woman in line at the Giant or at the drugstore or walking down the streets of Hope Springs and I nearly double over from the potent mix of pain and jealousy. That little voice whispers: Did I do the right thing?

  * * *

  The third week in October, I wake one Saturday morning to find Harrison’s face hovering over mine. His hands clasp my cheeks and I blink, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth with rubber cement. The dream I’d been in the middle of comes rushing back to me in flashes. It was the carnival again, the carousel music, the flashing lights; Oliver was there.

  Oliver.

  I try to push the image of him from my mind. To put him back in his rightful place as an enigma, a man I knew once, like an ex-boyfriend who is not an ex-boyfriend. But I’m finding as the weeks go on, he is not so easily put away.

  I focus on my husband’s face, his eyelashes centimeters from mine.

  “Wake up,” he whispers to my nose. “Let’s go paddleboarding.”

  “Yeah?” I say, searching his eyes.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  We rent the boards from a tiny outfit along the Delaware and Harrison turns down the class that’s being offered to teach us how to actually use them. “I’ve got you,” he says when I balk.

  And he does. He’s patient and calm, and though I’m nervous, balancing on the board is much easier than I thought it would be. I catch on quickly and we start moving at a good clip, the only sound our paddles splashing in the still water. It’s a beautiful morning, the air crisp with fall, the sun shining bright against the cloudless sky. Harrison points out an egret on the bank to the right of us. I look just in time to see it spread its long wings out and silently take off in flight.

  We’re so busy staring at it that I don’t notice my paddleboard drifting toward his until it’s too late. They collide, the resulting tremor throwing both of us off balance, and there’s nothing to hold on to in order to steady myself. We reach for each other out of instinct and then both go tumbling into the water, the sudden cold of it taking my breath. I come up sputtering and my eyes find Harrison, water trickling off his head, beading up in his beard.

  But instead of the shock I’m feeling that I expect to see mirrored on his own face, he’s smiling, an ear-to-ear grin that is so genuine it steals my breath all over again.

  Because after months of searching, of looking for him, suddenly there he is. My Harrison. Who knows every lyric to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” And thinks Road House is one of the greatest movies ever created. And wears bow ties daily because in med school on his gynecological rotation, he wore a regular tie and forgot to flip it over his back while examining a patient. Let’s just say I had to throw away the tie, he said to me one night, after sex, back when we preferred whispering secrets to each other, long into the night, over sleep.

  I grin back at him, and then as if he remembers himself, the smile slowly disappears and the lines return to his forehead, around his mouth. “You OK?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. He heaves himself back up onto his board, and so I do, too, but the joy doesn’t leave my face quite as quickly as his. I burn the image of him smiling into my brain, and know that I will patiently wait to see glimpses of my husband again.

  And I see them. I do. Random moments throughout November—an eye twinkle here, a laugh there, a joke even—a joke!—that had Finley and Griffin in stitches at Thanksgiving. Vivian caught my eyes and smiled.

  * * *

  The first week of December, I am in the bathtub and hear the front door open. “In here,” I call out to Harrison. It’s only seven, but he’s been coming home earlier recently and I’m trying not to get spoiled, while relishing the luxury of extra time spent with him.

  “Hi,” he says when his body fills the doorframe of our bathroom. He’s flushed, grinning, and I stare up at him curiously. “I had a good day,” he says.

  “You had a good day,” I repeat.

  He nods and I can’t help but return his smile, get infected by his happiness.

  “Come here,” I say, and when he gets close enough, I reach up for the buttons of his shirt, clutch the material in my hands and pull him toward me, his lips toward mine, and I kiss him fully, roundly. I kiss him until we’re both lost, and then whether I pull him over the edge or he rolls over it is unclear, but suddenly he’s in the bath with me, his shirt and pants drenched by the water. We keep kissing, both pretending it’s comfortable—the slipping and knocking of knees and elbows on the hard porcelain—until we can’t pretend any longer. And then he stands up, taking half the tub of water with him, and he picks me up like I’m light as air and takes me to the bed and I let him and I’m laughing and crying because I know in that moment that though my husband came home months ago, he is finally home.

  Chapter 28

  It’s one of those perfect almost-winter days. The sky is a radiant blue, the sun merely a decorative ornament of yellow—it does nothing to change the cold, crisp air of the afternoon. The first snow fell two days ago, just a few inches, and pockets of it remain, hugging the bottoms of lampposts, slippery stubborn patches on the sidewalk that refuse to melt. We’re standing in front of the True Value, watching our breath come out in big puffs. Harrison holds my gloved hand in his and I catch him staring at me for the third time in as many minutes. “What? Do I have something on my face?”
r />   “No, can’t a man gaze at his wife?”

  “I guess. It just feels like you’re laughing at me or something.”

  “Never. Just thinking how beautiful you are.” He studies me. “Your cheeks are extra rosy.”

  “It’s this freaking wind!” I stamp my feet trying to warm up. “I don’t know why I ever thought Hope Springs wasn’t as cold as Philadelphia.”

  He wraps his arms around me. “I would go get us hot chocolate, but Gabriel would never forgive me if I missed him.”

  We are at the Hope Springs Christmas parade, though it’s more of a festival—a holiday extravaganza—with thousands of tiny white lights and a lineup of activities after the parade: a choir performance and a Santa appearance, even fireworks. When we got the flyer in the mail, I left it on the counter. I wasn’t sure if Harrison would feel up to coming, but he said he promised Gabriel at Whitney’s last checkup and here we are.

  We wait on the sidewalk, watching the baton twirlers and a man on stilts throwing candy to the children lined up along the route, followed by train of convertible cars, one carrying the waving mayor, one a local real estate celebrity and one a woman in a crown and lipstick, her fur shrug covering the banner across her chest, rendering it unclear what pageant she has bested.

  We hear it before we see it, the marching band, enthusiastically out of tune. Four dozen ruddy cheeks peeking out from beneath the brims of their stiff hats. Harrison spots Gabriel in the back, his tongue pressed firmly between his lips as he concentrates on the rhythm of his sticks on the drum.