by Polly Dugan
We pulled up in front of the house. It hadn’t taken us that long to get back.
I stood on the porch and rang the bell. Andrew opened the door.
“You’re back,” he said.
“Where’s your mom?” I said.
“She went running. She just left. You could still catch her.”
Fuck. “She doesn’t want to be caught, Andrew,” I said. “I just forgot something.”
I went into the guest room to recover the pretended forgotten thing. I stood in the middle of the floor.
Change the plan. Pay the cab, wait for her, and stay.
That hadn’t been the deal.
Fuck the deal. This “deal” business really isn’t something you excel at anyway, is it?
So instead of begging—following my gut—instead of doing the risky, uncertain work of staying—when it truly mattered—I did what I knew how to do. I did the old, easy thing. Andrew stood in the living room and waited the whole time. He was still there when I walked back in.
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ll see you, buddy.” I squeezed his shoulder on my way to the front door. And for the second time that day, I left the house for the airport.
Audrey
After Garrett had said individual goodbyes to the boys, we all gathered in the living room. It felt like another mourning had overtaken the house. The cab pulled up.
“Safe trip,” I said. “Text me when you’re home.”
“Sure,” he said. He squeezed all the boys one last time, walked out, and shut the door behind him.
The four of us watched the black-and-white cab pull away. Then we stood there looking at the empty street.
“I’m going for a run,” I said. “You guys have plans?”
They all moped and shrugged.
“We’ll decide something when I get back, okay? Maybe we’ll all go to a movie.”
I put on my shoes, and stretched and headed out. It was too hot to run, but I went anyway.
When I came back forty-five minutes later, Christopher and Andrew were taking turns shooting baskets, each with his own ball, and Brian was sitting on the curb drawing. They seemed no less somber than when I’d left, but at least they were all doing something.
As I started to walk up the porch stairs, Andrew ran over to me.
“Hey, Mom. Right after you left, Garrett came back. Did you see him?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t. Why did he come back?”
“He said he forgot something,” said Andrew.
“Well, I hope he found it,” I said.
“I guess he did,” Andrew said. He turned and walked back to the street and I climbed the stairs.
For the rest of that day, and during the weeks that followed, I searched the house looking for something I imagined Garrett left for me, some kind of message or sign of what, I didn’t know, but I wanted one. I found nothing in every place I looked, which brought its own kind of heartbreak. More than once Leo had left me a Post-it on the bathroom mirror or a note on my windshield or inside a book I was reading. All kinds of notes: I’m an asshole. I’m sorry. Another: I love you. I feel like I haven’t seen you at all lately and I miss you. We need a night out. And the one on my pillow: This has been such a shitty week. I know the boys have been a pain in the ass. I’ll see you in the morning. After all that time, when I finally gave up, because I knew there was nothing from Garrett for me to find, I realized I’d been thinking of Leo, because that’s the sort of thing he would have done.
Garrett
I had a window seat from Portland to Chicago, and for the first time I could remember, I slept on the plane. I sprinted through O’Hare for the leg to Boston, certain I wouldn’t make it to the concourse, expecting to miss my connection. Although I didn’t, I had the shit luck of the middle seat, and the man who got the window boarded after me and I had to stand up to let him pass when he was done stowing his things in the overhead. After he sat he nodded at me and I nodded back. He looked like the news anchor Brian Williams, a well-groomed, impervious, dashing sort of fellow, and though I knew it wasn’t Williams, I wondered why the guy wasn’t flying first class. It wasn’t until after all the preflight instructions, taxiing, liftoff, and a half hour in the air, rising to our cruising altitude, that I noticed both of us were just sitting there, staring at the backs of the seats in front of us. I didn’t want to read, watch a movie, or even shut my eyes.
“You going to Boston for business or pleasure?” I said.
“Ah, neither.” He pressed his lips together. “Bit of a family emergency.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Since we’re just both sitting here. Plane talk.” I felt like an ass.
He shook his head and waved his hand. “It’s all right. We just can’t get there fast enough.” He didn’t resemble Brian Williams very much anymore.
“I’ve been there,” I said. “Even when flying’s the only way, it’s still too slow.”
“You have kids?” he said.
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m going to the Cape to get my daughter and bring her home. Back to San Francisco,” he said. “She was a freshman this year and she got a summer job with her girlfriends. But she’s too far away.” None of this sounded like anything terrible. “My wife, Jodi, and I, we have three other daughters, so I came. We are—we were—very close, Amelia, my daughter, and I.”
“I teach—I taught—at BC,” I said. “Freshman year is a huge adjustment no matter how far from home you are, but she’s a long way, for sure.”
He looked at me with a fresh recognition of relief, like he’d found a friend in a crowd. “That’s where she was last year, at BC. Good school.” Then his expression grew sad and he sighed. “But she got really sick, you know, not eating. She’s five foot nine and a hundred and ten pounds. I don’t know what the hell happened. She’s always been a good kid, talks to her mother, you know, talks to us both.” I looked at the guy again, folded in his seat. He was tall.
“Sorry.” He waved his hand at the air again, like he wanted to take everything back and return to sitting privately, undisturbed, until the plane landed and he could stop waiting, passive, and finally do something. “You know,” he said, “once you have kids you do whatever you can, as long as you can, for them. Then you do some more. I can’t just let her slip away to nothing.”
“No,” I said. “No, of course you can’t. Sorry that’s happening. Sorry I intruded. You sound like a great father. I hope she’ll be okay.” I wanted to take back initiating this conversation too. I wasn’t sorry we’d been talking, but I felt of no use to the guy after what he’d shared.
“No, no, don’t worry about it. Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for listening. I think she will. At least we’re doing something. My parents, their generation, would have had no idea.” He extended his hand. “I’m Brad, by the way.”
I took his hand and shook it and held on maybe a little longer than I should have. “I’m Garrett,” I said. “Nice talking with you, circumstances aside of course. Best of luck, really.”
He didn’t seem to mind the extended clasp and took his hand back when I finally let go. “So.” He turned his palms up over his lap. “What about you? Coming off vacation, heading back to work?” My turn.
“Something like that,” I said. “I’ve been in Portland and I’m just heading home to pack up and go back there. It was time for a change. There’s more for me in Portland than Boston, I think. Or at least there’s nothing in Boston to keep me there. I don’t stay in one place very long, so it was just a matter of time.”
“Wanderlust,” Brad said. “What a wonderful thing. It keeps you moving till you find what you’re searching for, or it just keeps you moving, if that is the thing you’re looking for. No standstill.” He smiled, kindly, like a satisfied man who had found what he’d searched for, pitying someone who hadn’t. “If you don’t keep looking, you’ll never find it, right?”
“Right.” I laughed. “Even if you don’t know what it is.”
&n
bsp; “But you know it when you find it,” Brad said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You do. You know it when you find it.”
Garrett
When I got to Boston, late, I took the T home from Logan, dropped my bags at the door, and collapsed into sleep. When I woke up at six the next morning, I felt a lot of things, but the sense of being glad to be home wasn’t one of them. It was a strange phenomenon to still physically inhabit a place I’d abandoned emotionally. Being back in my apartment, surrounded by my own things, felt as unfamiliar as if I’d wandered into a stranger’s by mistake, my key fitting that lock and allowing my entrance.
I didn’t text Audrey like she’d asked. I wanted to hurt her in some small way, as if I hadn’t enough already, and the only means I had was to deny her the only thing she’d asked of me: that I let her know I had returned safely. Not only did I want to deprive her of what she wanted, but I wanted her to wonder and worry that maybe I hadn’t made it. It was childish and passive aggressive; I wasn’t proud, but I was aware.
So for the second time and permanently, I was done with Boston; the rest would all be formality to put it behind me. I called my father and told him I was back and planned to take the train down to see him if it was a good time to visit, which he said it was.
The whole time I’d been in Boston, I lived in a brownstone in Brighton, off Comm. Ave.—it was a sweet place, but about as special as any sweet place in any city. Given the time of year, I was going against the tide. Faculty and off-campus students were moving in and unpacking while I packed and moved out. Fueled with coffee and music, I loaded six boxes of what I didn’t want or need anymore—like a map in relief, the things I was willing to keep and pack, move and unpack, rearrange and continue to look at, wear, read, or eat off of revealed themselves, and everything else went. After I’d dropped the boxes at Goodwill, I had less to contend with and more room to do it in. What I couldn’t fit in my car and haul to Goodwill I labeled FREE and put on the street. Within an hour the swivel desk chair I’d always hated but suffered, a forgettable bookshelf, and two lamps were gone. I spent the whole day packing, into the night, still living on Portland time, and quit at one o’clock, ten on the West Coast. The only things left in my apartment were my bed, my clothes, a coffeemaker, and one mug.
Early the next morning I took the train and stopped in New York to see the 9/11 Memorial. I had been there the previous year not long after it was completed, on my way to my father’s for Christmas. It was an uncomfortable but important place to visit, especially having been there before, when the Twin Towers still stood. I had been to the city numerous times and during one visit, the Trade Center was the meeting place for friends I’d met in Europe who’d traveled to the States. But it was a different visit this time, knowing of a victim, having a hero to look for. The first responders were honored at the South Pool and I found Jimmy Sullivan’s inscription there, and then his photo in the memorial exhibition. I wondered if Kevin had come back and seen it all. It was too crude a way to document them, but it was all I had, so I took pictures of his inscription and his place in the gallery with my phone. Since I would never know Jimmy Sullivan, I endowed him with qualities I imagined he had had, qualities that reminded me of Leo, which made him feel more like a friend than a stranger.
I left New York and took the train to Philadelphia. My father met me at Thirtieth Street Station and we had dinner at Bistro Romano, in Society Hill, at a table in the basement. Underground, surrounded by exposed bricks, in the most chaste terms, I told him everything, omitting Christopher’s part in what had unfolded, and that I was going back to Portland, and staying.
My father never seemed surprised by much, and even when he was—by what, I couldn’t imagine—I was sure he feigned the same unchanged, practiced expression. It was as though there was nothing he hadn’t already heard or seen before. He could easily convey happiness or impatience or irritability, but I had never seen him shocked, and tonight was no exception. After I finished, he only nodded and smiled. As much as I’d wanted to see him taken aback by something I’d said or done when I was younger, I was grateful tonight wasn’t the night it happened for the first time.
“I see,” he said. “That’s quite a spot you’ve been in.” He didn’t remind me of what he’d said to me in the airport right after Leo died, which I also anticipated and didn’t want to hear. But what he did say surprised me. “Son, why Audrey? What is it about her? If it’s not because of Leo, then why? And you don’t have to tell me, but you need to know, in your own mind, before you do this.”
I did know, or felt, I thought. But him asking me about it so boldly, with only love and care and no trace of judgment, invited an unveiling, and I wasn’t prepared for the exposure if I answered him.
I drummed my fingers on the white tablecloth, and he finished the last of his drink. “I’m sure you do know, Garrett,” he said. “And that’s enough. I’m not doubting you. You’re a father long enough, giving advice becomes a reflex you can’t control.”
Everything I could think of was a cliché. I kept drumming my fingers and watching them.
“Because she’s good for me. And because I’m afraid,” I said. I could answer his question, but I couldn’t look at him while I did. “I’m terrified she was it for me. Because she’s not perfect, and because she’s not, she is. I like what kind of mother she is. Because if I live to be an old man, the sound of her voice is the first thing I want to hear every day. I like the way she looks at me. Because she knows most of what there is to know about me, all my flaws, and for a little while, I seemed to make her happy anyway.” My throat was tightening. “Because even though we shouldn’t have—we never should have had the chance—we work. Worked. Because when we worked—even during those hard months—it had felt easy. Actually, that’s the only thing I should have said. Because we worked.” I squeezed my head in my left hand and pressed my eyes shut several times. I still hadn’t looked at him.
“Well, son,” my father said. “Then of course you have to go. It’s the only thing you can do.”
I felt like he had just walked in on me with my dick in my hand, but he was as unperturbed as he would have been if he was sampling produce.
“But it’s over,” I said. “I’ve ruined it. I ruined the whole thing. If she can forgive me, I don’t know—maybe someday she can. But that’s the least of it. She won’t ever feel whatever she might have, or did for a little while, with me, again.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said. Again, his assurance, his composure, seemed to reflect a different conversation, one that we weren’t having. Like one about who was likely to prevail in the next election. “But here’s the thing: for as difficult as this is on your end, uncomfortable and strange, dare I say painful, you’re going to have to wait, because it’s harder for her. Any and all of it. So you’re going to have to wait. That’s also the only thing you can do. For however long.”
Later, back at his condo in Radnor, I sat up alone till late, with a bottomless glass of Scotch, and pored over the photo albums my mother had amassed during my parents’ marriage. They had a different significance for me now, and as I turned the pages, I recognized that they were full of many photos I hadn’t known existed or had forgotten about. There were the basketball team pictures with Leo and me looking gangly and exposed in our uniforms as freshmen, and then less so with every subsequent season’s photo.
I refilled my glass when I got to Leo and Audrey’s wedding photos. My parents had attended, and there were copies of the professional shots the photographer had taken, but others caught me off guard. I didn’t know who had taken them—my parents? I couldn’t remember, but they must have brought a camera. My mother had filled all these albums because she always had a camera with her.
We looked so young, all of us, in the wedding party photos, surrounding Leo and Audrey, who radiated at the center of their friends on both sides. Then there was the series of me giving the toast. Initially I looked like I stood in front of a judge awaiting
sentencing, then simply nervous, showing too many teeth, then finally raising my glass looking at last like myself. Some looked professional and others, of the same scenes, I could tell my mother had taken.
When I came to a photo of Audrey and me, I took it out of the black picture corners that held it in the album, and stared at it. I had no memory of it being taken, and though I surely must have, I couldn’t remember ever having seen it before either. Nineteen years ago. We were in our twenties, babies. We look more like kids at our prom. In the picture, Audrey’s arm is around my waist and mine is around her shoulder, my fingers pressed into her arm at the edge of the cap sleeve of her dress. I could tell that my hand wasn’t resting there, loose, that my grasp had a gentle clutch to it. I’m still in my tux jacket, though I’ve lost the tie and my collar is open. Audrey is leaning under my draped arm, her free hand on my lapel. She is looking directly at the camera, with a candid but flawless smile, but I am not. I am looking off camera and lifting the glass in my free hand in the same direction. My mouth is open, not in a gaping, regrettable way—I was clearly captured mid-speech, attentive to whatever, or whomever, stood outside the frame. Comforted by the Scotch, I tried to think of possible captions, the audio to accompany the image: What I might have uttered, and to whom? To Leo, who was momentarily away from his bride? Or to someone else, asking about Leo’s whereabouts?
Can I get a refill!
Hey, where’s the good stuff!
When’s the band finished their break?