by Wendy Silk
I felt misgivings beginning to build within me at this line of questioning. Unwilling to let them ruin this moment, I pushed those feelings away. This was the kind of adventure I had always wanted. Way back when I started out at college, so many miles away from home, I thought I was only at the beginning of years of far flung travel. I could still do this. All I had to do was take the hand of this impulsive woman and agree to do what I wanted, for once in my life.
“I could do that,” I said. “I can find a way to take a break.” I knew I’d have to figure some things out, but I would find a way. “Alice, don’t you have any responsibilities, though? No kids, right? No pets? Nowhere you need to be?”
She shook her head defiantly. “Nope. I’m done with all that. I told you I was going to need to find a new apartment, didn’t I? I’m putting my old life behind me. No more David, no more being responsible. No pets. Definitely no kids. I might just start thinking of myself, and myself alone.” She grinned at me. “Except you. I’ll be thinking of you and me, and what we might be doing together.”
We finished our lunch and rose from the table, agreeing to meet again in just a few hours to plan our crazy adventures. I walked Alice back to her honeymoon hut on the water. It didn’t seem like the silly, forlorn extravagance that she had suggested it was yesterday. Instead, it struck me as a beautiful little spot, where I hoped that Alice and I would be spending a lot of time alone that evening. I couldn’t wait to press her against the bed in her room and run my hands along her body. We wouldn’t be out in the hot sun this time, wondering if anybody might come around the bend in the trail and see us. Tonight, we’d be in the lap of luxury, with all the time in the world to explore being together.
“Alice, I can’t wait to see you tonight.” As she stood in her doorway, I couldn’t resist kissing her. “This is crazy, but it feels exactly right to me. I know I want you.”
She looked at me from under her lashes, less bold that she had been during her inspired planning at our lunch table. “Grant, I feel the same. I know we only have one more day here together before we each have to go back. But tonight, we’ll make plans for our trip. All we need to do is set a date to meet. We can even buy our plane tickets tonight, once we figure out where we want to go first. What do you think?”
I kissed her again. “I love it. I’ll be back in two hours, after I make those phone calls. Then we’ll decide where we want to go. We have the whole world to choose from.” I finally managed to step backwards, away from her, and I turned back to the hotel and my own room.
Once there, I wondered if I was being underhanded in not yet sharing with Alice just what my room was like. She had asked if I had one of the smaller accommodations, the kind of room that a single tourist might select for a quick trip. I hadn’t been lying when I answered her that I was in the main hotel. I just hadn’t told her that my room was the enormous penthouse suite. She was worried about money, I could tell. It might not be fair to tell her quite yet that I had more than I needed, by far.
Back when Margaret was looking for an easy ticket to her dream of modelling success, she had chosen me because I was rich. I no longer had any illusions about that. When Alice had earnestly told me her ideas for working her way around the world, I had been struck by her willingness to apply elbow grease to get what she wanted. She was eager to work. I wouldn’t take that away from her. Instead, I would join her, living in a new way, setting us up for adventures and challenges that we would conquer together.
When I listened to my voicemails, my euphoria evaporated. We had been so eager to imagine what it would be like to live this off-the-wall adventure. I know, maybe I was too willing to rush the idea, just to have even one afternoon of pretending it was real. I had responsibilities that I could never run from, and that was plain fact.
My voicemail inbox was full of messages from my brother’s temporary caregiver. I had hired a woman from an agency for the first time in ten years, just so I could take this trip. Somewhere in my mind, I had compartmentalized my awareness of how hard it had been to do that, fooling myself into believing that I could keep that arrangement up for an extended period of time while Alice and I traveled together. I was a fool.
The messages began with simple concern, then spiraled into near panic, just in the course of today. Toby hadn’t been adjusting well to my absence. He was refusing to communicate. Then refusing to eat. By the last message, the caregiver was near to her breaking point, I could tell. Toby was agitated; she wanted to see if I could come back a day early. This was coming from a well-qualified professional, who had presented excellent references. She was worried that he was having a harder time that we’d thought he would, and that it would affect him permanently. She needed me to return.
All my dreams vanished. As I listened to the messages in order one more time, I knew I was not going to be traveling with Alice. Perhaps I would not ever travel again. Those days were over for me.
I didn’t know how to explain this to Alice. She was so full of energy and freshness. Her face lit up when she thought of the new things she wanted to see and do. I couldn’t weigh her down with my responsibilities. She had just said that she was sure she didn’t want any of that. No kids, she’d said. For years, I’d been like a father to Toby. I loved him, and it was worth it. But I couldn’t find the words to explain that to Alice. She was young. She’d just been hurt. She needed to be able to find herself in the world without the weight of my baggage.
So I did the only thing I could think of doing. Like a tool, like a coward, I left. I called a car, arranged for a flight off the island within the hour, and I was gone. I sent no word to Alice. There was nothing to say.
Chapter 7: Alice
The gray skies of the Pacific Northwest were all I could see from every window on my plane. I sat at the very back, in economy. I was returning home using the tickets David and I had bought for our honeymoon, and he was a man who never would have agreed to spend money on first class. Not after we’d splurged on the fancy honeymoon accommodations. He always placed limits on how much we should treat ourselves. At this point, though, an economy plane seat was plenty for me. I was the one who had put the purchase on my credit card, and I was the one who’d be paying it off.
For some reason, it helped if I stayed focused on David and the things about him that rankled with me. The smaller things, like the way he always brought me coffee the way he liked it, rather than the way I did, rather than the larger things like the fact that he had been banging his office manager for months. If I continued to test myself on the subject of how much David had hurt me, then I wouldn’t have to think about how stupidly I had just behaved in the Caribbean.
I was painfully aware that my actions had been monumentally stupid. I’d met somebody at a beach resort and gotten drunk with him. Then I’d had sex with him--not even in a bed, but actually on the beach, on a blanket in the sand. Then, to make it all worse, I’d suggested to him that we run away together. What a shocker it had been when he disappeared. I had waited all day at the restaurant where we’d had lunch, but I knew from the first moment that I’d been ditched.
Was there any man alive who wouldn’t have done that? Maybe he could have just told me that he wasn’t interested. I wasn’t sure why that part hurt my feelings so much. The ghosting had been the worst thing. If he had just admitted up front that he was only interested in a fling, I would have been up for that. I knew I was on the rebound, in pretty much the biggest possible way. A one night stand would not have been the end of the world for me; it could have been fun.
Leaving me without a word, however, was just about the lowest thing he could have done. He was a jerk. He had made me feel stupid and unwanted. Now I was not only the kind of girl who gets left at the altar and cheated on, but I was also the kind of moron who sleeps with a guy on vacation and naively thinks it is going to be life-changing. I shuddered to myself. It was all true and there was no denying it.
As the plane approached the gate, I adjusted the sunglass
es I was using to hide my red, swollen eyes. There was no sunshine outside, or in the airplane for that matter, but who was going to stop me from wearing them? I was pissed off, and ready to bury all the crap I’d just been through under a permanent veil of forgetting.
At least I still had my job. I loved my work, loved the kids. The whole flight back, I’d been making plans to immerse myself in the fall semester at the high school. I’d be the best mentor ever, showing these kids new ways of understanding life. It would make my existence meaningful. I would become a new kind of person: not somebody who people left behind, but a leader who set a tone of helping others be their best selves. It was inspiring, just thinking of it.
After the inevitable hassle of getting my bags and finding a taxi to take me all the way to my outer suburb of the city, I was ready for action. David had already given me a deadline for vacating the apartment we had shared together. In those few minutes after he had dumped me in the tiny room at the side of the church, he had said that he was going to stay with Vicky for two weeks. That was all. I had thought at the time that I wouldn’t be able to remember anything. That hope had been futile, however, and I could now recall exactly how he smiled when he said her name. Vicky. Vicky’s place. That’s where he was now. I had one week left to find a new apartment, one that didn’t have his name on the lease, or her long blonde hairs in my bed. I was just guessing about the last part. I hadn’t found any, but it seemed like a pretty safe bet that they were there.
I sat at my desk, tucked into an alcove in the living room, and I remembered when I first heard Vicky’s name. I was the one that had introduced them. There was no end to how awful all of this was. Vicky was somebody I’d known for years. I’d watched her grow from the beautiful but dull teenaged daughter of my school district’s superintendent into the stunning but boring young adult that I recommended for a job at my fiancé’s office. What a transformation, right? She was just the same as she’d always been. I couldn’t even muster up any real hate for her. She had behaved predictably. It was David that I hated. Although, now that I thought of it, he was pretty predictable too.
I sighed as I logged into the management system for my school district. It was going to be awkward seeing the superintendent. I hardly ever ran into her in person, but she knew who I was. I had meant to do her a favor when I put Vicky up for the job as David’s office manager. Maybe I had even thought that if she noticed me in a positive way, it might help my own career. I don’t think that was anything too unusual, to be tempted by an idea like that.
But now, as I looked for my calendar of commitments for the new school year, I found nothing like what I had expected. The job I’d been so proud to return to, putting my energies into helping others, was no longer in the system. I myself was no longer in the system. What kind of weird software bug would do that? All I could find was a red flagged message from Deirdre, the superintendent. She wanted to see me in her office immediately.
My stomach clenched with apprehension as I dialed Deirdre’s secretary. Of course this was some kind of scheduling mistake. I was union. There was no way they could just fire me out of hand. Once I was assured of an appointment, I dressed quickly and drove over to the main office. In a small town like mine, nothing is very far away. The only thing that seemed like it was evading my grasp right now was anonymity. I would have given anything to be returning to a job in a huge city, where nobody would have time to notice my embarrassing personal problems.
Once I arrived in Deirdre’s office, I felt even more swamped by the sense that my private difficulties had become public property. I wouldn’t exactly have said that anybody pointed and stared, giggling as I passed, but the truth was that they kind of did. Ouch. As I stood in front of Deirdre, I fought the temptation to shift my weight from foot to foot as if I were an errant student being called to the principal.
“Alice, it’s good to see you.” She welcomed me smoothly, giving nothing away about why I was there. “We are all just about to hit the busy fall season, and I wanted to catch you just when you returned from your trip. How was the Caribbean?”
“It was beautiful, thank you,” I replied. I was beginning to resent the fact that I was there as a supplicant, pushed into a role of subservience with a woman whose daughter had just stolen my fiancé. It was uncomfortable, to say the least.
She drew it out, like some kind of torturer. “Did you get to spend much time in the water? I know the reef is lovely there.”
“Yes, I did,” I said. “I did some snorkeling.” My sense of disassociation from this interview grew. Was she pretending that there was nothing weird between us?
Like a sleek predator cutting through surf, Deirdre made her move. “Alice, I’ve called you in here today to discuss something in your file. There are serious accusations against you and your professional conduct last year.”
That wasn’t what I’d expected. Nobody had ever made any accusations against me. I led a blameless life as a dedicated teacher. I had always had good evaluations from both supervisors and students. I attended meetings and signed up for administrative committees. I was so stable that it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t Vicky who was the boring one.
As I hesitated, searching for words, Deirdre continued. “It’s come to my attention that you received a disciplinary warning last spring about…” She raised her eyes at me, looking over her dark-framed glasses, “About stealing. This is a significant charge.”
“I don’t know what that’s about,” I stammered. “That never happened. Nobody’s ever accused me of anything like that. Can you tell me what the report says?”
She looked me in the eye and stood. “No. I can’t tell you any more than this. It’s a confidential case.”
My heart was racing as I began to panic. “What do you mean, ‘confidential?’ It can’t be confidential from me. I’m the one who’s being accused of something. Stealing what? From whom? It never happened.”
Deirdre leaned across her desk toward me, speaking with a peculiarly firm rhythm. “Here’s the thing, Alice. I’ve got a report that states that it did happen. There’s nothing you can do about that.” She cocked her head. I don’t know why I had thought we would ever be able to have a normal conversation. She was actually enjoying this. Vicky must have told her a string of lies about me. “Alice, you’ll be leaving the district. Now.”
I was starting to shake, but I tried to pull some semblance of pride around myself like a blanket. “This can’t be right. What about the union? I have rights, you know. I’ve been at this district for six years; my whole teaching career.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. If you want to get into a legal battle with me, you may go ahead and do that. If you want everybody in this small town to discuss your personal life and whisper about how you stand accused of stealing thousands of dollars that should have gone to low-income students, then you may. Nobody will believe that you could pay for a trip to the Caribbean on your teacher’s salary. It’s much more likely that you stole money from the office. Isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not. I’m a hard worker. I’ve been saving for years. Everybody knows that about me. I have friends here.”
Still standing, Deirdre picked up my file and tapped it against her desk, indicating the matter was closed. She even smiled at me. ‘If you want me to go public with this, I will. Otherwise, please hand in your resignation by the end of the day. Go quietly, and I won’t even block your ability to get recommendations. But go.”
I couldn’t remember later how I had gotten from her office into my car. The tears had blurred my vision by the time I was taking the steps down from the big brick building. By the time I sat in my car, I was sobbing. All I wanted to do was to curl up into a ball on my bed. I could close all the curtains and sleep for days.
Except that I had to find a new apartment. Most of those things were no longer mine. I would never see some of that furniture again. David had already owned the bed and the dressers when I moved in with him. The kitchen table was one we�
��d picked out together. Who would get that? What about the blue couch?
I knew I was distracting myself by trying to think of practical things. I didn’t have to. It would be easier to let it all go. I thought of the apartment, the furniture, the framed photos. All of it could slip right out of my fingers, and I wouldn’t miss it.
My old life was like a sparkling diamond ring that I was willing to let go if I had no other choice. It was twinkling as it drifted away from me, swooping on currents, but settling somewhere far away, where I hoped I would no longer see it. Or care.
Chapter 8: Grant
When I arrived home after abandoning Alice at the resort, I knew the only way forward was to forget her. I had to concentrate, but I thought I’d be able to move on as long as I had no memory of that moment in my life in which I had thought I could do anything. She was cute, yes, but the whole thing had been silly. I had obviously just been going through some kind of mental crisis having to do with overwork. Now that I was back at home, and back in my routines, I could put those ideas behind me.
My guilt about leaving Toby for even a week’s vacation had festered on the way home. Here I was, gallivanting around, when he would never be able to do anything like that. He was my responsibility, and I was going to start taking that more seriously. More than that, though, I loved him. He was all that I had left of my family, of my childhood. He was a great kid who deserved a real effort from me.
Now that Toby was eighteen, he was starting to think about his future and his independence. Ten years ago, when Margaret drove my car into a tree, he had been the lone survivor, but he had paid a heavy price. Since then, a decade of physical therapy and emotional counseling had improved his condition. What he needed now was a life in which he knew he could count on people. Me. He needed to be able to count on me