Any Bitter Thing (14 page)

“Did you eat?” he asked.

“Yes.” Canned spaghetti. A lemon Gatorade. A slice of spongy bread with margarine. A paper towel laid across my lap.

“Where?”

“Some restaurant,” I said. “I forget where.”

“You don’t know where you ate?”

I wrung out my shirttail, kicked off my wet shoes. “I didn’t notice. I wasn’t looking.”

He peered at me. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” I said, but there was a certain inebriated swirl, a swampy imprecision, to my words and gestures.

He stared at me the way he stared at fresh photographs, as if determining how closely the facsimile matched up with his recollection. I figured he was wondering how to leave me, when to leave me, without looking like a heel. I didn’t blame him for thinking that.

He fumbled toward me and I rested against him for a moment, but my hair was wet, and my clothes; our joining felt clammy and strange and unwanted. We disengaged and I sat down.

“Come back,” he said, very softly. “Please.”

I rested in the chair, exhausted. It was a wonderful chair, made for two, a more sumptuous version of the one Harry Griggs had rescued from the street. I’d bought it just before my accident, imagining that the two of us, Drew and I, might find our way to repose there, reading, legs entwined. Somehow we hadn’t managed to broach the chair’s vicinity at the same moment. I felt sorry for him all of a sudden, living an itinerant childhood only to land in my arms and believe he had hit solid ground. He still had the power to move me this way; I hung onto that.

“You could have left a note,” he said evenly. “You could have found a phone. Would that have been so much trouble? We called everybody we could think of in this stupid, washed-up, goddamned
town.”
He shook my arm, hard. “Lizzy. Come
back.”

“I’m already here,” I whispered. “This is me. I don’t know how else to say it.”

I remembered an evening early in our marriage when we drove back to Boston for an awards ceremony at the Marriott Long Wharf. Enchanted, we sat through witty speeches from columnists we’d heard of, then the presentation of three dozen awards, some to the big guns, some to small-town papers with a staffoftwo. Drew won for a photograph that had appeared in the
Globe
, a soul-crushing image of an exhausted, middle-aged man whose burning house appeared as a reflection in his eyeglasses. As his new wife, I pulsed with pride, but when he sprinted back to our table with the plaque seized into both hands I caught something in his face, a confusion of purpose that fleeted across his brow. That moment was the beginning of a protracted and ambiguous struggle between us, but at the time I merely blinked it away.

Gradually, reluctantly, we defined the terms of the struggle and named it Boston. He wanted to move back and I didn’t. He was sick of selling tickets at school dances and I wasn’t. On the night of my accident, I came home from a baseball game and found him bent over his light table, inspecting a contact sheet.

“We won,” I said. “Eleven innings on soggy grass.”

“Go, Bobcats,” he said, not looking up. At his elbow lay a stack of duplicates from a sixtieth class reunion, eight apple-faced senior citizens arranged around a yearbook.

“Some of us went out for a beer after,” I said.

He kept sorting. “I would’ve joined you guys.”

“But you wouldn’t have,” I said, and in an eyeblink we found ourselves
en garde
in full armor, the word “Boston” standing in as the problem and the solution and the slow fuse and the tripwire. We didn’t yell, we were not yellers; we used quiet, controlled, reasonable voices, which was worse. Just before Drew opened his mouth to release the thing I refused to know, I stomped upstairs, pulled on all that black, then tore out of the house, heading straight for the soaked road. As I rounded the first corner I tossed back a look at what I could not yet know would become my old life, and there was Drew watching me from our house, his face scorched with sorrow.

The one who will save me
, he had once thought.

And I had once thought the same thing.

Now here I was in the that same house—my home—looking, apparently, like a wet drunk, unable to explain what I had been doing in Portland for the past seven hours.

“So,” he said, still studying me. “You went to Portland, a city where you don’t know anybody, in a
monsoon
, to eat alone in a restaurant.”

He sat down in the chair with me—it was a bit small for two people after all. “Can I tell you something, Lizzy?” he said. “Sincerely, now.” He stroked my wet hair, and his face—the high-angled face with a yearning expression that never failed to move me—inclined toward mine. “You counsel kids for a living, Lizzy, you know the drill. There’s no shame in asking for a little help.”

I looked at him. “I know that.”

“Call someone. Talk to somebody.”

“I found someone, Drew, I did,” I said, the lie taking shape almost before I saw the full range of its possibilities.

“You found someone?”

“In Portland.”

“Oh.” He exhaled. “For crying out loud, Lizzy, why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place?” He was still doing calculations in his head. “What time was your appointment?”

“Five,” I said. It was so easy.

“All right, five, and it was what, an hour?”

“About that.”

“Who—”

“Griggs. Doctor Griggs.”

“On a Saturday?”

I shrugged. “Those are his hours.”

“All right, so we’re at six o clock by now, and you ate someplace, so that’s, what, another hour?”

“It was pretty busy.”

“Hour and a half, then. So now it’s, what, seven-thirty, eight, tops?”

“Where are you going with this, Drew?” My head was starting to ache.

“It’s eleven-thirty, Lizzy, and you’re not yourself, is where I’m going with this.”

I closed my eyes. “God, Drew, I’m so tired.”

“I’m doing the best I can here,” he said.

I nodded, listening to the rain batter the roof we’d replaced, all those shingles we’d spent a week picking out on the first anniversary of our marriage.

“Remember the tree we put in the bucket?” I said.

I felt him smile. We stayed there awhile, in the double chair. Our breathing sounded deceptively peaceful.

“Drew?”

A pause. “Yeah?”

“Is she anybody I know?”

Then, perhaps because the rain outside slashed and fell, a persistent lashing against our jointly bought shingles, he relented. “Was” he said quietly. “She
was
nobody you know.”

We were staring ahead, not looking at each other. What I saw was our house, our merged clutter, the hopefulness implied in the mess we kept. Shelves sagging with paperbacks missing final pages, a box of socks with no mates, a kitchen burgeoning with mismatched cutlery and topless pots.
Fear not
, our earthly possessions seemed to say,
the rest of this stuff’ll turn up someday.

“I met her at a wedding,” he said.

“When?”

“Last February. The Lauzier wedding in Lisbon. Maid of honor’s roommate.”

I turned toward him. “Did you—?” I asked.

“We talked on the phone a few times, Lizzy, that’s all.” Now he looked at me. “It ended before it started.”

I nodded. “That’s kind of what I figured”

His mouth, which tended downward even when he was content, seemed to slide off its mooring. “I didn’t see any point in telling you,” he said. “It’s irrelevant now.”

“But I knew anyway.”

“Right,” he sighed. “I forgot about your supernatural powers.”

“Don’t”

He didn’t say anything more. We remained there another while, but the double chair really was too small and we both stirred eventually; I’d all but wrecked it anyway with my dripping clothes.

“I should get out of these wet things,” I said.

He stood up, folding his arms such that he appeared to be hugging himself, a gesture that always masked unease, a gesture
he made many times in a day, for Drew Mitchell did not feel easy anywhere. For now, he looked like a guy at a bad party in search of a graceful exit. “I was working,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward his office.

“Go ahead. I’ll be up for a while.” I peeled off my coat. “I’m sorry I worried you.”

“Mariette jumps the gun,” he said. “It gets contagious.”

“Tell her I’m doing better than she thinks.”

He nodded. “Will do.” He started to leave, then turned to me. “A kid called for you earlier.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. A girl.”

“Trouble?”

He tried to smile. “What else?”

Sometimes, not often, I got a call from a heartbroken freshman at the liquor-store phone booth, or a cheerleader whose boyfriend had popped her in the jaw, or a friendless outcast with nobody, absolutely nobody else, to talk to. It was still early in the year for night calls; but I was in the book, easy to find.

“I’ll be out back if you want me,” Drew said. His sober gray eyes took my measure, then he left the room.

A minute later, the phone rang. It was Andrea Harmon.

“Where are you?” I asked her.

“ShopRite.”

“Are you crying?”

“No,” she said irritably. “I’m wet. I feel like a gerbil on Noah’s ark”

“Well, it’s raining, Andrea.” I peered out the window. The storm had let up, having swept through quickly and left a gentle, autumny-cold rain in its wake.

“Look, I’m kind of stuck here, Mrs. Mitchell, and I had nobody else to call, all right? You’ve probably got like a house full of people, but like I said I’m totally stuck. I mean, if there
was anybody else on the face of this friggin’ planet, I would’ve called them.”

Her flattery notwithstanding, I said, “Are you asking me for a ride home?”

“Look, I know you’re probably like in the middle of a dinner party or whatever, but I’ve got no shoes on and I’m about four hundred miles from my house.”

I had no shoes on either.

“Are you
laughing
at me?” Andrea said.

“Of course not. Your mother can’t pick you up?”

“The state yanked her license.”

“All right,” I said. “Stay put”

I stopped to wash my face, get some dry socks, put on a raincoat. Drew was at the back of the house, where he kept a separate set of rooms. A tiny front office, which used to be a sun porch, had an entry that opened into the side driveway. Unlike the rest of our house, the office was spare: a desk and computer, a light table, two chairs for clients. On the walls hung prints of brides, graduates, toddlers in birthday hats, old ladies blowing out candles, families posed in front of fake trees, plus a few human-interest shots from his part-time work for our local weekly—city councilors in pressed suits, a new teacher holding a beaker, a crowd gathered around a burst water main. Next to that, in the previous owner’s spare bedroom, Drew kept screens and backdrops and other portrait gear. The darkroom resided in a former bathroom, just out of sight.

His own phone, his own entrance, a separate existence in our home. Not long before the accident I had stood in this very spot trying to retrieve the exact moment when we began our drifting, but it was like trying to pinpoint twilight, or midtide, or peak foliage. He was squinting into his computer screen, in an uncomfortable quiet.

“I’m picking up Andrea Harmon at the ShopRite,” I told him. “Some jerk left her there in the rain.”

He looked up wearily. I felt in an unwanted flash the toll I had taken on him since the accident. “You’re in no shape to go chasing after kids, Lizzy.”

“She’s desperate,” I said. “I won’t be an hour.”

“Let me drive.”

“I’m fine. It’s letting up.” In truth I didn’t think we could bear being in the car together just then; the silence had begun to hurt.

He started to say something but lost his zeal. “Do what you want,” he said quietly.

I knelt next to him, and he placed his hands on my shoulders. In only a small way I wanted our beginning back, that torn-flesh feeling of our Monday-morning partings. Hello or goodbye, he used to trace the shape of my face, one finger down each temple and cheek, ending at the point of my chin. Hello, Lizzy. Good-bye, Lizzy. More than that, I wanted the stage that was supposed to come later, the thing Mariette and Charlie seemed to have. Friendship, I guess, is one word for it.

“Touch my face?” I said.

He did. Not like before. “Hello, Lizzy,” he murmured. “I miss you.”

How strange that he would miss me. Maybe he meant an earlier version of me—the girl who went with him to get the Christmas tree.

“Me too, sometimes,” I said.

There was a moment that could have gone either way, our whole house a held breath: the thrumming rain, the
MITCHELL PHOTOGRAPHY
sign swinging outside on its hinges, the refrigerator starting up in the kitchen. Then it was gone.

“Bring a blanket,” he said as I got up. “She’s probably cold.”

I left my house, shouldering once again into the wet night, thinking, Things end. They just do.

I edged into the parking lot at the ShopRite near a bank of phones. Andrea tottered out of the mist like some undead creature in a horror film, a threadbare shadow in sock feet lurching toward the car. She sloshed into the front seat and slammed the door. “I owe you so big, Mrs. Mitchell, anything you want, you got it.”