The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  I licked my lips and looked up at the ceiling. Jeremiah’s face, Jeremiah’s face. “Yes,” I said, and swallowed hard. “I’m in love with Jeremiah.”

  Some sentences just come out in capital letters and hang in the air, and this was one of them. I could feel the reverberations of it. I waited for him to stand up and come over and hit me. I thought he might throw the coffee table over. Actually, I couldn’t imagine what he would do—anything but what he did do. He just sat there looking at me quietly, rubbing the toe of his shoe back and forth, and then he looked down at the floor and said in a flat voice, “Really. Imagine that.”

  “I know. It’s the worst thing that could have happened. I’m sorry.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Wow.” He shook his head, like somebody shaking water out of his ears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really didn’t mean for this to, you know, happen. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Suddenly he whipped his head down between his knees, moving so swiftly that I jumped. He was clasping his hands in front of him. I looked at his wedding ring and wished this would be over and that I would quit saying I was sorry.

  “You’re leaving me to be with him, then?” he said finally, from between his knees.

  “Yes. When we finish talking.”

  He kept his head down, didn’t look at me. “Does Carly know?”

  I hesitated. “He’s telling her.”

  “Now?” He sat back up.

  “I think so.”

  He actually laughed at that. “Wow. What an orchestration this is, huh? Two people each getting told the unthinkable. Did you two rehearse what you’d say? Do—what do they call that?—role play?”

  I stayed silent.

  “Do you mind if I ask you how long this has been going on?” he said. Then he held up one hand. “Wait. Never mind. I don’t need to know that. There’s no reason on earth for me to know that, is there?”

  I came over to the couch and sat down on the footstool in front of him. “I’ll tell you whatever you need to know, whatever helps. We didn’t want to hurt you.”

  He barked out a bitter little laugh. “Ha! Here’s something you could do for me. A little thing. Just during this conversation if you wouldn’t use the word we for you and … him. I mean, until just a second ago, if you said we, I would think you meant you and me.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I don’t want to be insensitive.”

  “Oh, no! It would be bad to be insensitive at a time like this, wouldn’t it? It’s one thing to just leave a guy without any frigging advance notice, but you wouldn’t want to be insensitive in the bargain.”

  In the hall we heard a door opening and a woman’s voice calling to a guy named Cal. It always sounded like she was saying, “Cow! Cow!” and Jeremiah and I had once laughed about that. He’d yelled, “Sheep! Sheep!” At the time I’d wondered if Grant would have ever made a joke like that, and then it had hit me that he wasn’t ever home long enough to have heard her yelling for Cal. I’d added that silly thing to my justifications for leaving him. Now that he was here I felt so horrible I practically had chills.

  He was silent for such a long time, leaning forward as though he was trying to keep himself from passing out, and then I saw that he was crying. Oh God, he was weeping. For me. He kept his head down, but his fists were covering his eyes. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat there. The clock on the stove said 3:55. I still had plenty of time. I didn’t know what to say or do. Should I try to comfort him? I was about to start crying again myself.

  “Oh, Grant,” I said, and touched his back. He didn’t pull away.

  When he spoke again, he said, “I can’t believe this.”

  “I know. We—I mean I—I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  He looked up at me. “You know what the bad part is? The awful thing is that I have admired and loved the two of you so much. That’s the thing. I don’t think I’ll be able to just stop so quickly.”

  “Oh my God, don’t say that,” I told him. This was so typical of Grant that it took all the air out of me. Couldn’t he even do the expected thing, play the part of the wronged husband and get fucking furious? As bad as that would be, it was preferable to this. “You should hate us. I’m sorry. Not ‘us.’ You should hate me! Go ahead. Get mad at me if you want to. You can yell and scream. Get it all out. I don’t want you to have to hold it in.”

  “I wish I could,” he said. “I know it’ll come to that. I’ll get mad. I have the rest of my life to be mad, I guess. I’m going to have to go through all of it. But right now … right now I’m just so ridiculously … well, blindsided.”

  “You were blindsided,” I said. I rubbed his back a little, like I could be his friend through this maybe.

  “How long …?”

  “Do you want to know? Do you want to know the whole thing? Because I’ll tell you, if you want. I will.”

  “Yes. Tell me that. Just that much, no more.”

  “It started the winter we got here.”

  He drew in a breath. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a long silence. “How did you do it?”

  I was startled. “How did we … what?” I said, and then after a moment, we both laughed.

  “No. Not that. I mean, how did you get away with it? How did I not know?”

  “Well,” I said. I licked my lips, which were suddenly very dry. “You really weren’t there very much, and—”

  “Don’t say anymore, okay? Be quiet now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” He kept breathing, in, out, in, out, as though he had to concentrate to remember to do it right. “That’s all I want to know. That’s a long time. Longer than I would have thought.”

  We were silent. The sun made a parallelogram on the wooden floor. I watched its edges wobble and dull as clouds went by, and then I watched as it brightened and sharpened again. My whole self ached. I was one big toothache of a human being. I had hurt this person who was bent over with pain, pain that I had caused, and nothing I could do would make it even one iota better. I decided that I would watch as three more clouds went by, and then I would get up and leave. I couldn’t imagine what that was going to be like—actually going in and getting my suitcases from under the bed and walking out the front door—but I had come this far, and I had to do it. There wasn’t a way to turn back.

  Then he was the one who got up. He rose in one sudden motion and went into the bathroom and closed the door, and I stood up, too, and got the suitcases from the bedroom and dragged them to the front door. When he came out of the bathroom, I was standing in the kitchen area. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I folded my arms.

  “There’s something I want to leave you with,” he said. “This is just between you and me now. Nothing to do with Jeremiah.”

  “Okay,” I said. I licked my lips again. I felt as though I had no more moisture in my body. I wasn’t precisely sure that he wasn’t going to land a blow that would level me. I braced for it, but instead he took my hands and looked into my eyes, unflinching.

  “You have a core of sadness in you,” he said. “I’ve felt it. And I have some ideas about where it comes from—you know, the family stuff and all that. I thought you and I might, you know, be together enough so that we’d get rid of that. But we couldn’t, and part of that is my fault, and timing, and my teaching and all that. Maybe you needed somebody who could be there for you full-time. You deserve that, I know. And if he makes you happy, if he can give you that, then I just want to say that this is what’s probably supposed to happen. Maybe—I think this is possible—maybe you’ve found the love of your life.”

  “Oh, Grant.”

  “And so I’m glad for you. Really, really glad. Because you need to grab on to whatever you can in this life, whatever makes you—whatever makes you happy. There’s so little of that in life. That’s grace, you know. A concept that, by the way, I didn’t know I believe
d in.”

  There was a lump in my throat. He saw me trying to swallow, and he put his forehead against mine and held it there. “It hurts like hell,” he said. “That it’s him—I mean, I’ve lost both of you, I know that. But I’m not so dumb that I don’t think things happen for a reason. And maybe my place in all this was, you know, to introduce you to the person you’ll always love. How’s that for shitty irony, huh? Grant loves the girl but hands her over to the guy he admires.” He shook his head and closed his eyes. Then he pulled his hands away from me and said in a different voice, a sterner voice, “Okay. So go. And don’t call me, okay?” He opened his eyes and looked right at me again. “Don’t, do not, come back, either. If for some reason this doesn’t work out, I’m sorry, but you can’t come back.”

  I tried to hug him, but he pushed me away, and then we said good-bye. I wasn’t crying. I couldn’t cry; I was dry as dust. And then, before I knew it, I was out in the hallway with the suitcases and hauling them down the stairs, thinking, in my shell-shocked, dramatic way, Good-bye to all this! and then I was down on the street. I hailed a cab, in slow motion, and went to Grand Central.

  Jeremiah’s face. Jeremiah’s face. My new life was beginning. I walked away from the old, and I didn’t let myself look back, even at the building. I was so afraid Grant might be at the window. I could practically feel his hand there on the glass waving good-bye, and I couldn’t bear it.

  It wasn’t for another week that I realized that Grant hadn’t even lifted a finger to try to make me stay. He had just released me the way you might whisk away a rogue feather that landed on your shoulder.

  I GOT to Grand Central at a quarter ’til six, which gave me time to lug my two suitcases to the ladies’ room. I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I stood for a long time looking at myself in the mirror and tried to smile. My hair was in a bun but the ends were falling out, so I twisted it up again and shoved the bobby pins back into it. My eyes looked scared. Someday, I thought, I’ll remember this moment just before my new life took shape. Maybe someday Jeremiah and I will tell our grandchildren about this day, the day we ran away, knowing that we were meant to be together. But for now I looked drained and sickly. I put on some lipstick, tried to pull myself together. I was going to be with the love of my life, and I didn’t want to look so tragic.

  When I finished, I took everything back upstairs to the clock. We’d agreed to meet at the clock, which is where everyone always meets at Grand Central, so all around me people were standing, waiting, or else flying into someone else’s arms, kissing, hugging, laughing, yelling, clapping each other on the back and then walking off together. I was so young and alone, standing there with that frozen smile on my face, that look of expectancy, waiting to be chosen.

  And he was late.

  First he was only five minutes late, and then it was six minutes and then seven. I told myself I couldn’t look up at the clock until at least fifteen whole minutes had passed. I concentrated on staring at the floor, at all the trash that had been so carelessly tossed about: old tickets, gum wrappers, gum. Then I stared at shoes. Men’s shiny wingtips, children’s sneakers, high heels clicking on the hard floor, loafers scuffed from age, sandals. Even boots, some idiot wearing boots though it was clearly and obviously springtime, a time for new beginnings, time to put away all the stuff of winter. I felt sorry for the boot-wearer.

  Twelve after six.

  Maybe I should buy our tickets.

  No. It was better to wait.

  I allowed myself to look up and search the crowd of faces coming toward me—all blank, unknown faces, filled with hurry and pain and thoughts I couldn’t read. I shivered. I could not think of what would happen if he didn’t come, although once that thought had appeared, it was difficult to chase it back to the corners. It bloomed then, pulsating and radiant in capital, bold-faced letters, with asterisks around it. It was a headache of a thought.

  What if he does not come?

  But then—was it?—yes! Someone with Jeremiah’s hair color was coming from the area of the stairs, and thank God THANK GOD it was Jeremiah; the relief that flowed through me was almost like oxygen. He was loping, not running at all, even though we were late, and the thought sprang into my head that maybe we wouldn’t make the 6:37 after all, but who cared, really? We had the rest of our lives; we could catch any damn train we wanted. We could just go somewhere dark and cloistered and kiss and drink and tell each other about our getaways. Mine was taking shape as something I’d probably be able to live with and talk about. I was not too disappointed with the way I’d handled things; I was already forgiving myself, filing away the grief of a broken marriage … and then through all that self-forgiving I was doing, it hit me that Jeremiah had no suitcase. And then when he was still far away, his eyes met mine, and he made the smallest of gestures, a slight, ironic raise of his eyebrows, a pursing of his lips, and on such flimsy evidence, I knew everything I needed to know—that I was alone, all alone in the world. He hadn’t told her, he hadn’t left, and it was me he was coming to say good-bye to.

  I remember everything about that time, of course, everything from the texture of his shirt that I cried into, looking down at the scuff marks on the floor of Grand Central, the hum of noise all around us buffering what he kept saying over and over again: “I love you so much. I love you so much.” The reeling inside my brain, my thoughts swinging around inside like a tetherball coming unhinged. Bright flashes of light.

  He couldn’t tell them. The children. The children’s eyes and faces, their little hands … Brice was stuttering, Lindsay was bossy; they needed him so much. And today—his voice choked—today they were playing a loud game, loud but innocent, so innocent, and Carly was screaming at them, so how could he leave them to her? To her anger? And yes, he knew she wasn’t always angry, but she was often angry enough, and because of that he had to make it work with her. And make no mistake, it would be work. He had to stay and be the buffer between her anger and those children. He loved me and he was sorry, but we couldn’t run away. He kept biting his lip. We had to stop, we had to stop seeing each other, there was no hope for us, no hope for love in a world gone mad with regret.

  He actually said those words, “a world gone mad with regret,” as though he were the narrator of the coming attractions at the movies, intoning them, and after that I stopped listening and prayed that I would stop loving him, immediately. If I just paid attention to his body language, to the look on his face, I could see that he was relieved and proud of himself, and when he closed his eyes and said in a fake agonized tone of voice, “Oh, I’m so confused,” I wanted to hit him, wanted to scratch his eyes out. I screamed, “You fucker! You fucking fucker! And this is the first time you’ve thought of all this? Now? You didn’t know this before?”

  He tried to say something. I could see his mouth moving, see his eyes wide and black and sorry, but I couldn’t hear him through the pounding in my head. Blackness was starting to fill in all the white spaces around his head. I was about to fall down, I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, and the next thing I knew I was running, and then I was somehow in the ladies’ room, where I lost everything I hadn’t already lost, and I could hear the floor shaking from the trains that were leaving the station.

  Would it be too melodramatic for me to tell you that I never saw him again? But it’s the truth. I did not. I was angry for such a long time—and that fury was good. I fed it breakfast, lunch, and dinner and rocked it at night and nurtured it along because I understood it was all I had.

  [fifteen]

  2005

  “What’s the matter?” says Sophie when I get back to her apartment. “You look drained. Didn’t you have a nice time?”

  “I had a very nice time. I’m just tired,” I tell her, draping my coat over the back of the chair in the bedroom. I am tired, now that I think of it, tired and shaky. I had caught a glimpse of myself in the tiny oval mirror in the downstairs hallway and was shocked at the two bright circles on my cheeks
and how wild my eyes looked. Holy God, I think, today I stood in public, kissing Jeremiah. I am now officially lying to my husband, and even worse, I don’t know what is going to happen with me.

  I want to just get straight into the bathtub and sit there staring at the white tile until I can figure out how I feel about what I’ve just done. But Sophie is sitting up in bed with the light off, with the lavender comforter wrapped around her, sniffling and looking mournful. “So … was it depressing to talk to your old friend? It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Depressing?”

  “Yeah. You know, with how run-down he seems.” She blows her nose into a Kleenex. “Didn’t he say his wife died? So I bet he’s all depressed and pathetic and just wants you to cheer him up.” She hiccups.

  “Are you crying?”

  “No … yes. A little bit.” She pulls at a thread on the bedspread and puts on her little-girl voice. “Could you just come and get in bed with me? Pleeease.” And now she really is crying.

  “What’s wrong?” I sigh and take off my shoes and climb in next to her. The room feels overheated and stuffy, and all I want is to leave again. But she throws her arms around my neck, and we lie there while she sniffles softly. “What is it, baby?” I say. “Should I not have left you alone?”

  “No, that part was okay,” she says into my neck, which I realize is getting wet. She pulls away and blows her nose on the tissue I hand her. “It’s just that I now know the truth. I found out the real truth.”

  My heart stops. She knows?

  “He—he’s sleeping with Juliana. I know it for sure now.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Did I miss something? First, who is Juliana?”

  “She’s that woman in the picture. The one Whit was practically making out with.”

  “Not making out with. Smiling in the general direction of.”