While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  “I don’t see how they can say this,” Eli said. He ran his hands wildly through his hair. “How can they say this?” We were sitting in the kitchen, the three of us. Larry had come in as Eli and I were having lunch and slapped the papers down on the table. We’d taken turns reading them, sometimes aloud.

  “God, she’s dead, isn’t that enough?” I said. “It’s so crazy. Even they don’t think any of this is connected to her dying.”

  “It’ll fade,” Larry said. “It’s good copy for a while, and then they’ll find the guy and that’ll be that.”

  “But meanwhile it’s like they’re killing her all over again.” I began to cry. “It’s so much not who she was.”

  “It’s not who she was, it’s not who any of us are,” Eli said. “I can’t believe they can get away with it.” He slammed his fist on the table. “There must be some laws for our protection. For her protection.”

  “But it is who we are. That’s how we are seen. That’s how this society understands us,” Larry said. “You forget that. This”—he held the paper up and rattled it—“this is their truth.”

  “I can’t think about that,” I said. “Don’t talk about it.”

  “You can’t afford not to,” he said.

  So I suppose, over the next week or so—the papers kept it alive as long as they could—that this was some of what we all mourned and adjusted to, also, this recognition of the enormous gap between how we had understood ourselves and how we were being described. Not just a gap, actually. More a contradiction. Because everything we’d seen as making us innocent or good or open or pure—our sexual honesty, our willingness to stretch the limits of our minds chemically, our political activism—exactly these things were what were now being described as tawdry, or disgusting, or criminal.

  I must confess that the smallest—in every sense the smallest—part of myself took some private credit for never having actively participated in any of it beyond a toke or two at a party. The very thing that had made me feel frightened and rigid then became now the source of a secret pride. Which brought a quick dose of shame in its wake every time I allowed it.

  I wanted to sleep with Larry again that night—the third night—but he wouldn’t let me. “It’s a bad idea,” he said. His voice seemed large in the dark, too loud. “I’m a horny bastard. I’ll talk with you, though, if that would help.”

  I said it would, and so he got up and we went downstairs together. I made coffee and we took it to the living room and sat down opposite each other in the sagging couches. It was then that he told me he was attracted to me. “I have been all along, Lish,” he said. He laughed. “Lish. Joey. Whoever the hell you are.”

  “Have you? Dana thought so. I didn’t.”

  “How come you’re so dumb?” His tone was friendly, affectionate. He was wearing pajamas and big fuzzy slippers.

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “I mean, about you or anyone. I’m still all screwed up about my marriage. I am married, after all.”

  “So you say.”

  “I am. I’m going back. I guess. It seems I am anyway.” We hadn’t turned the living room lights on, and Larry’s face was hard to make out in the bluish half-light seeping in from the kitchen.

  “But what are you going back to?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. And I tried to explain it all to him—who I really was, how my marriage had been, what the Ace of Spades had meant to me, all my reasons for leaving. He was interested and sympathetic.

  And then, of course, we came back around to Dana again. At one point I asked him, “Did you ever love her?” It seemed to me everyone had. “Were you ever attracted to her?”

  “I loved her,” he said. “I don’t see how you couldn’t love her. But I was never interested in her sexually. She was too lonely for me, too hungry or something.”

  We both hoped she’d lost consciousness quickly. We imagined the moment of her coming in to find the thief. We imagined the various things she might have said. Can I help you? Do I know you? Not really scared, we thought. Just, Dana. Hi. What’re you doing here?

  She hadn’t struggled at all, the police said. No scratches or bruises, no cuts on her hands, which there would have been if she’d tried to defend herself, tried to grab at the knife. No flesh under her fingernails. It seemed as though she’d simply received the knife thrusts and tried to move away. We puzzled at this. I thought it was a sign of her goodness, her unwillingness to think evil of others, even of someone trying to hurt her. Larry’s vision was more complex, darker. He had thought of Dana as nearly helpless in some ways, compelled not to offend and fundamentally desperate to be loved. And therefore passive, maybe even too passive to protect herself from a murderer.

  We talked about how quickly it must have happened, how she’d just wakened, perhaps—her bed had been slept in. That maybe she didn’t have time, really, to react in any way before she started losing blood and moved away to try to save herself.

  “God, if I’d just come home a few minutes earlier,” I whispered.

  “And then he would have killed you too,” Larry said.

  “Oh, no! He wouldn’t have killed two people.”

  He snorted. “Of course you’re right. He absolutely drew the line at one, our boy. He was a man of some principle.” He’d gotten a cigar a little earlier from his stash upstairs, and now he was gesturing with it.

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  But I was imagining it, Dana coming barefoot down the stairs, just as I opened the front door. Her eyes puffy from sleep. “Oh, hi!” she says. “I thought I heard someone.” And then we both hear a noise in the kitchen, the thief leaving, panicked by our voices. We go in together, together we find the kitty lying empty on the kitchen floor. And the terrible news is only that we’ve lost seventeen dollars and change.

  Larry and I talked about perhaps passing the guy in the Square, the very guy, one of the druggies who’d lived on the common all summer, desperate now for money. Or just a petty thief, a guy who made his living testing doors, popping easy locks, scooping up what he could quickly and getting out. Someone you might sit next to at Joe and Nemo’s or Albiani’s. This is what the police thought now. They were going through their files, picking up everyone known for this kind of crime, checking alibis.

  “It seems so amazing to me, so scary,” I said to him as we washed out our cups in the kitchen, “that it could just be so random. That it could have been Sara or me walking in on him and dead now. I’ve never thought of life that way before,” I said, vowing privately never again to lose sight of this.

  “I think I always have,” he said.

  When I told my mother and Ted that I needed to stay to see things through, I wasn’t sure what I meant. The police were still talking to all of us then, pretty much daily, so that was some of it. And Dana was being autopsied, a horrible part of the incompleteness. I suppose I thought that when that was over, I’d go to her funeral, I’d meet her parents and say how sorry I was. I suppose I thought the house members would all go together, in fact, all of us who had known her so well in her real life, and loved her, and could tell her family how remarkable she’d been. I wanted them to see her as we did, as I did, to know how honest she was, how loving, how her impulse was always to give of herself, to want to comfort others. How her hands and body made a ballet out of the most ordinary gestures. I wanted them to imagine her dancing wildly by herself in our living room one rainy afternoon for the sheer joy of moving, or turning to me as we trekked across the Cambridge Common in the falling snow, tears in her eyes because it was so beautiful, because she was afraid she might not remember this moment forever.

  But none of that happened. On Friday, the day Dana’s body was released, two of her sisters drove up from Chicopee to collect her possessions. They’d called the night before, and we’d straightened up a bit for them. I’d forced myself, finally, into Dana’s room and made her bed, pulled up the covers sh
e’d thrown back when she went down to meet her killer.

  Her sisters were both stout women, one Dana’s height, one much smaller. The larger one was in her late forties, I think, and graying. The smaller one was older than that, and she in particular made me think of photos you see of Polish peasant women: her woolen coat was a little too tight across the back, and she wore a babushka, as the women in those photographs invariably do. Both of them had the high, rounded cheekbones, the slanted eyes, that had announced Dana’s Slavic heritage too.

  They didn’t want to talk. They barely responded when I said how sorry we were, how much we loved Dana. I showed them her room, and they looked around silently at the female chairs, the snakeskin, the life drawings of Dana, naked. The larger one’s lips tightened. “The police took some things,” I said apologetically.

  “Hmm,” the smaller one said.

  I trailed them when they went outside to get liquor boxes from their car. I started to help, but the little one—they hadn’t said their names, just “We are Dana’s sisters”—pulled the box from my hands and said, “We can do this. Don’t!”

  I felt as if she’d slapped me.

  I retreated to the kitchen then, and smoked and drank coffee while they went silently in and out past me, banging the glass storm door behind them.

  On the last trip out, the larger sister stopped in the kitchen, resting her box on the table in front of me. I tried not to look, but I saw, nestled in the clothing, two of the little beasts the police had left behind.

  “We’ve left some things up there. Some trash,” she said. Her voice was hard, as oddly ugly as Dana’s had been.

  “Fine. I’ll put it out.”

  “You’ll see, it’s all in the boxes. It won’t be much trouble for you.”

  “Fine,” I said. She started to pick up the box again. Her hands were large also, reddened and chapped.

  “Will there be a funeral?” I said. “A service?”

  “It’s just for the family.”

  “Oh, we’d want to come. We were her family, too, you know.”

  “It’s just for the family. The real family.”

  “But we loved her. We . . .”

  But she was shaking her head, her lips a dark, grim line. “No one, no one but the family,” she said.

  “But we so much want to . . .”

  She set the box down. “Let me tell you. You listen to me. You stay the hell away from us. My parents are old, how do you think they feel? This about killed them. Their daughter, their baby, dies before them. This is the worst thing, the worst thing for parents. But then, no, you—you, her so-called friends—you have to drag her name through the dirt. How do you think that feels? Eh? They open the paper and it’s Dana Jablonski this, Dana Jablonski that. All of you, and your drugs and your dirty ways, talking such filth about her? Who are you to say one thing about her?”

  “But we didn’t! We didn’t talk to the papers at all.”

  “Ahh!” She flapped her large hand at me. “You’re all . . . scum.” Her eyelids thickened, reddened. Quickly she picked up the box. “Liars and the worst kind of scum,” she said, and left.

  I went to the door after her. I was going to say something, I didn’t know what. To defend us, to speak up for our connection with Dana, for mine anyway. But by the time I got there, she had stopped outside, the big one, at least ten feet from their car. She’d set the box down on the ground, as though she suddenly found it unbearably heavy. She was shuddering helplessly, while the little one reached her stumpy arms up around her, her hands in their white knitted gloves like two little wings opening and closing on her larger sister’s broad back.

  And so it was over. I talked to the police one last time and left them with the various telephone numbers where they would be able to find me. Sara and Eli were looking for other apartments, other houses. Larry was going to stay on until the end of the month, and then he didn’t know. Maybe Marlborough Street for a while.

  I left in the late afternoon for an early-evening flight. Sara was back at work. Larry was at a class, and I was glad not to have to say goodbye again. Only Eli was home. He had offered to go with me to the airport, but I turned him down. My last sight of him was as I left in the cab. A light snow was falling, the start of a big storm. The sky was a sullen, pregnant gray. The front door was open behind Eli, as black as it is in the photo I still have of all of us together. He stood framed by it, his shoulders lifted against the cold, his hands shoved into his front jeans pockets. I pressed my palm to the icy glass as we drove off and saw him lift one hand in answer. I watched him until we reached the corner, but he still hadn’t turned to go inside. The cheese stands alone, I thought, one of those irrelevant phrases from some other part of life that sometimes occur to you at highly charged moments. And then I was haunted by that nursery song off and on all through the time it took me to make my way back to my other life.

  CHAPTER

  6

  That’s what I was doing, then, traveling back to my old life to see if I could pick up the pieces—to see if there were any pieces left to pick up—when I met Daniel.

  We were in Logan Airport in Boston. Our flight had been delayed for several hours because of the gathering storm. I had drifted around, drinking acidic coffee in the restaurant, reading the Globe quite thoroughly—there was no mention of Dana that day. Now the flight had been called, but it was overbooked. A small crowd was milling around the gate, and when the attendant got on the speaker system to ask if anyone would be willing to give up his seat and fly out the next day in exchange for a future free ticket, Daniel and I both stepped forward, along with two other men—one a student type with an enormous backpack towering ominously over his head, the other middle-aged, clearly a businessman.

  I suppose I could have gone back to Lyman Street for the night, but the idea never occurred to me. Or perhaps it occurred and was nearly simultaneously dismissed. I know I felt I’d said my last goodbye, I’d closed the door on that part of my life, on those people, on “Licia Stead.” In any case, I rode with the others on the shuttle bus to our free night at the airport Ramada Inn, still thinking of, still humming, “The Farmer in the Dell.”

  As we were checking in, the businessman—Dave, sporting the long sideburns that respectable people were just beginning to wear—proposed that we all have a drink to celebrate our decision and our future free travel. The point of this was to have a drink with me, the nubile blonde, I could tell that. But I didn’t want to be alone in the hotel any more than he did, so after I’d taken my bag to my room, I went back downstairs to the bar to meet them all.

  Of course it was Daniel I ended up talking to. The student fled fairly quickly, and then it was just a matter of waiting Dave out, which took a while. But finally Daniel and I were alone together at the over-varnished dark table, and we stayed there as the room emptied around us, as the bartender gave last call and started to clean up. As he finally flipped the other chairs up and rested them, legs in the air, on the other tables.

  What I knew about Daniel by the time we were walking slowly through the deserted lobby to the elevator was how unnervingly beautiful I found him—pale and fine-boned, with a physical reserve, a kind of tautness, that compels me still. And that he was kind. He’d been especially kind to me, but he had also been kind to the student, and even kind to Dave. I knew that he’d been in the Peace Corps in Africa, that he’d grown up on a farm, that he was in divinity school in Boston, a worried believer who thought he could help people, could make a difference in the way they felt about their lives. What I felt I understood about him, what seemed to glow in his intelligent face, was that he was good, with a goodness I believed in absolutely, even then. You couldn’t not.

  And what did he know of me? Well, first the basic facts. That I’d grown up in Maine, gone to the University of Maine, and taught high school for a short time before I became a waitress. After that much information, Dave left, and things got more personal and tawdry. Daniel learned that I was married, that
my life was a mess, that I’d been willing to get off the plane because I wasn’t in a hurry to go home to my husband, which was where I had to go. That someone I loved had just died. That the world seemed a place without meaning or heart to me. I’d wept briefly, sitting at the gleaming table with him, and he’d leaned forward to shield me from the eyes of the bartender and the only other people left in the room, a couple getting noisily drunk at the bar. For a few seconds he placed his hand tenderly on the side of my face, and I had the sense that if I could only stay here with him, everything would be all right.

  The elevator doors had just closed us in, he was just saying, “You know, I wish we could . . . ,” when the universe seemed to lurch and the doors slid open again. I saw that we were on the fourth floor. Mine.

  “God, that was a fast ride,” I said.

  He reached over to hold the doors open for me. “It was. Much too fast.”

  I backed awkwardly out of the elevator, and we said good night over its threshold. As the doors shut on Daniel, his mouth was opening to speak. I stood for a moment, wondering what he might have wanted to say, and then I turned and walked slowly down the dim, carpeted corridor to my room.

  We saw each other in the morning, of course, jockeying in line for the plane, but it seemed easier not to talk then beyond a nod of grave recognition.

  It was more than three years before we met again, in New York this time. I was the one who called him, tracking him down through his divinity school. I had thought of him often in those years. Thought of his face mostly, the incandescent skin wired with some kind of internal light; and of his cool hand, touching my face. I was working for Dr. Moran in that interval, and then in veterinary school. My life was solitary for the most part—animals and colleagues excepted—and full of hard work I’d already come to love. Occasionally, though, that pattern would shift, and I would become, for a time, wildly, angrily promiscuous. I’d use six or seven people in rapid succession. And then I’d be done and retreat again to isolation and work.