by Carol Mason
‘No way. If you’re not having a glass of wine I’m leaving.’
I stop and look back at him properly now. ‘Is this your roundabout way of telling me you know I’m always secretly clamouring for a drink?’
‘Ha,’ he says. ‘No. Actually, not at all.’ Then, ‘Are you?’
I huff a small laugh then trot inside. When I come back out with his lemonade and my vino I say, ‘Yes and no . . . To answer your question.’ I kick my sandals off and plonk my bare feet up on the opposite chair. ‘Not so long ago I was probably consuming a little more than was good for me. I mean, not compared to how much my friends can sink . . . My friends actually send each other birthday cards joking about how they all belong in AA.’ I suddenly miss Deanna and the neighbourhood circle on a visceral level. I firmly believe there’s a part of a woman’s being that can only be fulfilled by friendships with somewhat like-minded people her own age. You don’t have to bare your soul and confide your darkest secrets. But knowing they’re there, and you can, is everything. Mark’s words ring true suddenly. Maybe I could have made slightly more of an effort to be closer to them. In fact, I doubt there are any maybes involved.
‘Wine was the only thing that helped me sleep,’ I add.
‘This was back when your marriage ended?’
After a moment, I nod, sensing he can see right through me but for the first time not minding. It might not be the most natural segue to this, but I find myself saying, ‘I liked your letter.’
‘There’s a but coming.’ He pretends to grimace.
I smile. ‘No! It’s actually interesting because I came along to the Correspondents’ Club not really knowing why I was, except that, perhaps a bit like you in Afghanistan, I’ve always found some harmony with myself when writing things down. I can detach and take all emotion out of what I want to say when there’s no actual human being in front of me . . .’ I look down at my right hand clutching the fingers of my left. ‘Anyway, two meetings ago I wrote a letter to my daughter not really thinking she’d reply. But it just occurred to me that the very night you’d have been sitting there writing to me was the night she sent me a text.’ I smile again, feeling my eyes tear up. ‘It was one of the good things that happened to me – maybe the only thing. I did your exercise and I realised all I’d done to bring it about was to stop fixating on why she should probably hate me forever more, and just try to be the old me again.’
‘Mothers and daughters . . . it can be tricky. I know. I have a sister.’
I suddenly see us sitting at opposite ends of the sofa reading the same thriller on our Kindles the very night before my actions changed everything for all of us, our feet docked into each other’s sides. Jessica saying, ‘Oh my God! Are you up to that part yet?’ I can’t pull my eyes away from the image of it.
‘It can be a challenge,’ I say. ‘You can be close but you don’t always get on – I’m her mother, not her best friend.’ The memory of our quarrel is trying to push to the surface but I stomp it down. ‘Sometimes you have to be firm and that doesn’t always make you popular. But I always aimed to lift her, not put her down. I hope I made her a confident young woman who has the quiet ability to never devalue herself . . .’
I don’t really know why I’m saying all this or even if it’s true. Is it wishful thinking, to make myself feel better? I didn’t exactly lift her before she ran off to Europe, did I? ‘You said in your letter you were sitting there trying to write to Lisa.’ I change the subject.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We’re not good at phone calls. She just gets upset. But try as I did, I didn’t even know what I wanted to say.’ He stares off into the distance, as though he might be searching for it right now. ‘A long time ago I told her I couldn’t promise to change. That’s just too big and probably unrealistic . . . I’ve done a lot of thinking since I left. It’s so much easier to think without the bias of her presence. And yet I don’t know what I’ve really come up with. Some things just feel too complicated to take apart piece by piece.’
I am happy we’re talking about him again. ‘My mother used to say the truest test of your feelings is if you can picture life without that person. Can you picture them with someone else and you being fine about it?’ Can I picture life without Mark? Is this what I’m secretly trying out?
‘Yeah.’ He nods. ‘I will probably find it very hard to see her with someone else, if the truth be told, but in many ways that would be the best outcome. It might make things a whole lot easier if she phoned and told me she had a boyfriend. There’s part of me would be relieved.’ He looks momentarily filled with self-loathing. A shade of him I’ve seen before. ‘I mean, heck, she’s told me plenty times she’d have been better off with the first guy she ever dated. The thing is, she never really needed to say it because I already knew.’
I hang on to his words, to the sadness in his eyes, taking me away from my own. Our conversation tends to bounce around a lot, dismantling part of me then welding together other elements. I sometimes find myself marvelling at this.
‘One thing I do know,’ he says, ‘the worst thing that can happen to a marriage is not talking. Ours was built on that. I was either coming down from a mission, or gearing up for one. Distancing myself to make the leaving easier. I could never tell her where I was going. When I returned I couldn’t talk about anything I’d seen or done . . . She once said she had no sense of “belonging” with me, and I took that as a huge slight on my character. But it was true in a way; I belonged first to the military. I couldn’t be her everything. She deserved someone who could.’
Belonging, I think. That comfortable place of connection and acceptance. Yes, I used to know what that feeling was like. Before Mark and I became epic failures in both those regards. I know exactly what he’s talking about.
‘But she was with you,’ I say, not wanting to wander off down paths that lead to self-reflection. ‘She obviously loved you. Maybe you’re projecting on to her what you think she feels, but maybe that’s not how she feels at all.’
He doesn’t answer that but says, ‘Everybody wants to be somebody’s great love, don’t they? No one wants to be their biggest mistake. And if you’re even thinking along those lines it’s probably time to cut out.’
‘And that’s what you’re doing? Cutting out?’
‘Well, she’s not my biggest mistake . . . that’s the problem.’
‘Ah . . .’ I find myself nodding – slowly understanding, and yet not. For a telling second or two I am unable to take my eyes from his. They are separated but he’s still in love with her? This smack of reality has caught me by surprise, his honesty almost a little too reverberating. I have to look away because I feel him reading it from me, gleaning what I didn’t even realise was there to glean. I stare across the yard with this terrible sense of myself falling between the cracks, a sense of inexplicable despondency.
I had somehow seen him as single, not as a reluctantly divided unit, even though it makes absolutely no sense – why would I have seen him either way at all? Then I remember my own words: things are never as over as we think they are. That’s the problem. I see Mark’s face. Love has all these roots you just can’t kill.
‘So you would go back? If she asked you to?’ I have the urge to retreat into a corner to pick it all apart and see where the wires got crossed.
‘How will it be any different? We’ll work for a time until we won’t work again. Plus we have a kid; we can’t keep false-starting. When he was little you could paint a different sky on his world, but not now. He’s a clever little guy . . .’
I love how his face brightens when he mentions his son. But just as swiftly it’s gone again. ‘It would be impossible for her to forget all the pain that being married to me has caused her. Love isn’t enough. Understanding isn’t enough. Empathy . . . All that only goes so far. When people hurt you deeply, even when it’s because they are hurting, you can’t forgive them. Or if you do it’s way too conditional – and it’s hard to live the rest of your life waiting f
or the next let-down to happen.’
This makes me think of Mark and me again. Will I ever trust that if anything else comes along to test us, as this has, he won’t want to jump ship? Need to be in the company of someone who doesn’t constantly remind him of it?
‘We have to admit that we lost,’ he says. ‘And for a guy like me to do that – it’s very hard, you know. I can’t stand all that waste . . . that waste of her life.’
His words both stun and sadden me. Despite the unthinkable he’s been through, he’s more sorry for her than he is for himself. Isn’t that what it really means to love someone? It suddenly occurs to me: in all of this, who am I most sorry for?
He tilts his head back, stares at the sky. ‘It’s just all so fucked up. A mess.’
‘I told my husband I found another woman’s necklace on our bedroom floor when I didn’t . . . And I did it because I needed to catch him off guard, see if his face was going to contradict his words.’ Ned is watching me with a whole new level of intrigue. ‘So that’s it on a very basic level. But the crazy thing is there’s even more to it than that . . .’ I try to shrug it off with a little laugh. I am still rebounding from the realisation that I’ve been finding myself spinning a bit of a fantasy about this guy, probably to take me away from what really matters. Only he wasn’t really taking me anywhere at all. He’s in no position to.
‘And you have no idea what I’m talking about,’ I say. ‘And I couldn’t even begin to explain it to you even if I tried. So how’s that for messed up?’
‘What did he say?’ he asks, surprising me.
I smile. ‘He didn’t flinch. He just said, “Come on, you and I both know you didn’t find any necklace on our floor! Because she’s never been in our bedroom. Because she doesn’t really exist.” Then he added, “You need to get help.”’
‘That’s pretty messed up,’ he says.
Not talking is the worst thing that can happen to a marriage . . . Ned’s words won’t let me settle or sleep. I suddenly panic at the thought of what we have come to and conduct a ragged search under laundry and a stack of sofa cushions for my phone. When I find it I pull up Mark’s cell number. My finger hovers over the call button.
But I have no idea what I want to say when it comes down to it. I don’t really know what the particular straw was that broke us, so I wouldn’t know how to fix us either. I also can’t promise to change – too much has happened to make me anyone other than who I now am. I can’t promise anything at all. And deep down, even though Mark wants to believe, I know neither can he.
After a few erratic beats of my heart I click out of there.
I find myself staring at my Messenger app and then for something to do I open it. The last message I sent was to Sarah, her name is still at the top of the list. But – how strange! – beside it there is no longer a little icon that indicates it hasn’t been read. Instead there’s a small circle that contains her profile picture, indicating it has. I click on the message and scroll to the end.
Seen 19 July
I blink a few times. No, it’s still there.
Every hair on my body must be standing up.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘I’d like to take you out for dinner tomorrow night,’ I tell him as I oil one of Beth’s cast iron pans. ‘A token of my appreciation for the deck.’
He appears rather taken aback, then vaguely amused. ‘You’re taking me?’
‘Yup.’ I stop what I’m doing. ‘You show. You eat. Me pay.’
‘Hmm . . . Never gone on a date where a woman’s paid before. Doubt I can do it.’
Beth suddenly comes in, tugging down a sunflower-print umbrella. I’m just about to tell him it’s not a date, it’s a thank you, when she says, ‘You’re becoming quite the coffee drinker.’
‘It’s working . . . Clearly.’ He glances me over deliberately. ‘Olivia just asked me out for dinner.’
Beth wags a finger at me. ‘The hired help are not supposed to fraternise with the customers. But where are you planning on going if I might ask?’
‘So you can put word out?’ I quip. ‘Inform Yurt from the B&B? Maybe he’d like to squat nearby, armed with his telephoto lens?’
‘Burt,’ she says, smiling. ‘And I hear the crab shack is popular.’
‘That’s where I was thinking of, actually,’ I tell her.
Ned winks at me. ‘Ah! No one said anything about crab . . .’
‘You’re sold.’ I mop my hands on a paper towel. ‘Lovely to know it was a dead bottom feeder from the ocean floor, rather than my scintillating personality, that won you over.’
Beth titters.
‘What time were you planning on picking me up?’ he asks.
We are shown to a quiet corner – a dark cedar booth warmed by a Tiffany lamp. The booths form a raised dais around another dining space that looks like it doubles as a dance floor. There is a jukebox in the corner. Fats Domino is singing ‘Blueberry Hill’.
When I come back from the toilet it’s a fairly long walk to our table and for the course of it I can’t take my eyes off his back as he sits there. As I get nearer, I realise we’re the object of scrutiny – four women closer to Ned’s age, seated on the dance-floor level. I shrug off my black blazer, throw it on to the leather seat and try to ignore the heat of their gazes.
‘You look great by the way,’ he says, having the courtesy to stand up as I approach the table.
The compliment takes me aback and I unnecessarily look down at the fitted little black short-sleeved shirt that I’ve paired with my jeans – the one Jessica always steals off me. It’s plain except for a funky thick cotton hem that’s all frayed like the dog might have chewed it, which explains why it cost two months’ worth of groceries.
‘I like your hair up too,’ he adds.
I resist the urge to touch my messy French pleat. ‘One more compliment and I’m going to have to leave.’ I smirk. Little does he know it was a down-up, down-up, ah! Just leave it! sort of decision that I’m feeling self-conscious about now he’s drawing attention to it.
‘Lisa won’t leave the house until her hair is lacquered to perfection and she has a face full of make-up,’ he adds, cocking his head as though seeing her right now. ‘It makes her look a lot older, I think.’
With the casual way he inserts his wife into the conversation the butterflies in my stomach stop their flitting around. In fact, they might die altogether. A young waitress arrives bearing water and a bread loaf. She looks at Ned and her eyes immediately drop to his burned hands. ‘Can I get you guys drinks?’ She blushes crimson. We order tomato juice for him and a large white wine for me.
‘I’m going to insist you have three of those,’ he says to me, just as the girl is leaving and I catch a flicker of a grin from her.
‘Then you’d have to carry me home.’
‘I would have said it’s OK, you’re tiny, but that nearly got me into trouble once.’
‘You have a memory like an elephant.’
We smile. We reach for our menus at the same time, peruse them in pleasant silence.
‘So what’s a SEAL like as a child?’ I ask when I’ve made my mind up what I’m ordering. He is wearing a blue and red checked shirt with a button-down collar. In his efforts to smarten up for dinner, he looks even younger and more clean-cut than before, every bit a soldier.
‘This is totally first-date conversation, by the way.’
I grin. ‘Less of the wishful thinking! And I actually do really want to know – I’m not just being fatuous.’
He closes the menu. ‘OK, Barbara Walters. Well, I guess I can only speak for this SEAL. But I think I was pretty normal. Once I got straightened out, that is.’
‘Ah-ha!’ I find myself de-stressing a little. ‘This sounds like a story I must hear.’
‘Well,’ – he seems to relax a little – ‘when I was seven, this kid came at my head with a brick in the schoolyard, so I threw a punch that nearly broke his jaw. The school wanted to expel me. It didn’t matter
I hadn’t started it, all they cared about was it wasn’t a fair fight; we were the same age but I was bigger.’ He shrugs. ‘It took me a while to get it. Just because somebody hurts you, you don’t have to hurt them back worse, which you might think is odd coming from a guy in the military . . . I guess I realised I was strong, and I had to be careful how I used my strength. But once I got it, I felt so wholeheartedly responsible for who I was and how I acted. But nobody seemed to believe me. I remember wondering, are you ever truly forgiven? Are we all just the sum of our worst actions? Since then I’ve had recurring dreams where I’m always trying to convince someone of something but they never believe me.’
‘Wow,’ I say. A shiver grips my spine at the thought of worst actions. ‘I used to always dream I’m about to be shot. I googled it once. It said it means if you continue on this path you’ll die.’
‘But we’re all going to die.’
‘Well, I know that . . . Of course, like everything you read on the Internet it can also mean the opposite, can’t it? Being shot in my dreams might mean I’ll get to live a rich, long life!’
The waitress returns with our drinks and I try to affect some class and not lunge on mine. I am conscious of being like a wire trying to uncoil. We order the crab, a salad and the potatoes baked in Gruyère and cream.
‘So you were a reformed human being after your childhood misdemeanour, were you?’ I say once she’s gone.
‘Yup. Never had much of a stupid side. No drugs, drink. Never kissed a girl until I was sixteen, and I was an old man of eighteen before I lost my virginity.’
‘To Lisa?’ Just a sip of the wine has loosened my nerve. I rest an elbow on the table and place my chin on my upturned hand, aware of feeling flirty.
‘Now that would be telling you far more about me than I know about you.’ He holds my eyes, steadily, like I am a challenge to him.
‘What’s to know?’ I pick up my wine glass again, hold it in front of my face, stare through it.
‘I don’t know, Olivia. Tell me something. I’ll take whatever you give.’ Then he adds, ‘Why the US? Why Seattle?’