Away From Everywhere (4 page)

When Lillian got home from Hannah's service, Owen didn't have to pry for the summary. She came in, brushed snow from her jacket, put on some coffee, called out to him, assured him that she was alone, and sat him down at her small, round, mahogany table. She burst right into one of her philosophical rants, but all he wanted was the details of the service: Who wept and who stood stoic? Had the circumstances of her death polluted the atmosphere? Trimmed down the attendance? His head was full of uncouth questions he couldn't bring himself to ask. They'd have to sit there like burning embers.

She tore into an obviously prepared speech, stringing sentences together without pause. “I am not going to try and justify what you did, because infidelity is cruel and savage,” she said, speaking as matter-of-factly as she always did.“But I know, like you now know, that in an affair people are too quick to blame
people
, because our feelings are out of our hands, and anyone with a grain of sense knows that much.” She plucked her earrings out and slapped them down on the table as she finished the sentence.“Your father and I sat around this table having the same conversation one night,Owen.”She tapped two fingers on the table, her thick pink nails dinging like metal on wood. “He said love is beautiful in the same way a lion is. Half the beauty is in the sheer power of the thing. The control it has over you. And the chance it might tear you apart.”

It was evident she'd practiced this speech in the car on the way home, as a consolation for him, and the need to be consoled, to have his actions justified, made him feel pathetic and irritable.

“Our feelings are out of our hands. We cannot blame ourselves for how we feel. Sometimes it just happens, like rain.” She pointed at the window, like she'd just made a genius comparison.“Sometimes it just rains.”She was stumbling now, obviously off course in her pre-planned speech.

“What I am trying to say is that sometimes two people cannot ignore something bigger than themselves. When an affair is committed between two people in love, not just two people fooling around for the thrill of it, it's a little different. She must have loved you to physically act on her feelings, Owen, and you loved her, right?”

He shot her a quick look – wide eyes and an open mouth – that said,
I do. Not did.

“And that is why I am still talking to you. I know you've been wondering.”

He picked a receipt up off the kitchen table and rolled it into a ball with two fingers. “I just. I can't imagine being Alex today. It's surreal. I just can't. Most men might not have gone to the memorial service. I don't think I would have. I just, I don't think I could have looked at her knowing she … you know?” He avoided the description, still ashamed at his role in it all.“Alex has always been the noble sibling, I guess. I've just been his brother, the other son. And now the heartless bastard who ruined his life.” He let the balled-up receipt drop back down on the table. It bounced twice and fell to the floor. Lillian bent over to pick it up.

“You're anything but heartless, Owen. It takes more than one mistake to be heartless.”

“My life has been a series of mistakes.”

“It's only a mistake when it's your fault,”she said, getting up from her chair. “Goodnight.”

“Thanks for trying.”

He meant it.

After Lillian had gone to sleep, Owen went into the living room with Hannah's journal. When Lillian claimed the belongings from Hannah's written-off car, on Alex's behalf, her journal had been amongst the items in the bag. Owen went through the bag when Lillian had left the room. The journal wasn't his to claim, but he justified it, knowing she might have written about him. About them. Alex didn't need to hear about the affair, in detail, in his wife's words. But Owen did.

It was hard-covered. It was black, with a red spine, and had a sunburst orange stain on the lower left-hand corner that looked like a sea anemone. The surface was smooth and matted, indented with a long ago completed to-do list. She must have used her journal as a writing surface in bed one night. He ran his fingers over those indentations. He liked picturing her in bed, her purple pajamas loose and resting against her perfect body in a way that made her look vulnerable, desirable. On the inside cover she'd written her name, then scratched it out with a black sharpie marker.
Hannah Collins
. As if she was unsure, unsatisfied.

He sprawled out on Lillian's slippery, brown leather couch. He put a pillow on his chest to prop up her journal. It was the closest he could get to Hannah now, so he'd savour it, like each entry was a fifty-dollar bottle of wine that needed some occasion to be uncorked.

He let the journal unfold in his lap and read a random excerpt:
The final stage in the evolution of any relationship is the death of intimacy. You can love someone after that point, dearly, but just not the same way.

He turned a few pages back, and read some more.

…and worse still is knowing that I could be beautiful, ravishing even, but it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter because the world is full of beautiful women. It wouldn't matter because I know Alex wishes I was more of a professional woman, by his definition, and he seems, at least sometimes, to be embarrassed by me when he introduces me to his female friends, who are all doctors, lawyers, and other success stories.
Women with televisions in their BMWs, and enough makeup in their purses to sink the Titanic, who travel just to say they've been there and done that, but do nothing when they are there. But who am I to judge, really? At least they've been there and done that. It's just that all his friends are the same person. Only the name changes. Alex knew who I was when he married me, how I am. It didn't seem to matter then.
It does now. And the truth is, everything about his life is flawless, so shouldn't I be? These women, these “female acquaintances” of his, they are petty, shallow. But maybe that is what he likes about them. They aren't too deep to drown in.
Like me. Their traits are external and evident: bony hips like handles and cleavage even a priest would glance at…

Owen closed the book and lay down on the couch. He'd read it like a novel, front to back, dog-earing his favourite parts. For the first time since the affair started, he reflected on how it had all begun and traced it back to him telling Hannah all the things Alex was taking for granted: petty, innocent little things, like how good she was with Callie and Lucia, that she made her own mayo instead of buying it, and how she bit her lower lip in a really cute way when she spread it over a slice of bread. Then he started noticing all the complimentary things there were to say to a woman like Hannah.

He loved her need to touch things, how she'd rub the velvety skin of a peach before biting into it, or how she'd smooth her daughter's shiny, jet-black hair every time she hugged her. And then he thought of her delicate, tactile hands as those of a passionate lover. And how weightless his body would feel with her hands on it. His mind would drift as he watched her planting bulbs in the garden, or scrubbing forks and knives in the kitchen sink. And he started picturing her body without those clothes on it: the jeans that carved out the curves of her body and the cardigans she always wore over shirts that cupped her breasts, like hands to be jealous of. He hated it when she wore her grey cardigan with the white tank top beneath, because whenever she bent forward he could see everything he wanted from life and everything he couldn't have.

The image hollowed his bones.

He started picturing her lying on her back in his bed, naked, the fingers of his right hand snaking slowly from her belly to her breasts, to circle her nipples and feel her quiver beneath him. He took that image to bed one night, and couldn't face her the next morning. He'd waited until ten o'clock so she wouldn't be in the kitchen. But she was.

With the girls entertained by the television, she sat at the kitchen table reading a novel. He watched her from the corner of his eye as he searched the fridge, a little too long, for milk. She'd periodically use a finger as a bookmark or just splay the book open on her thighs, and stare out the window – because every cloud was a miracle to Hannah, and it was that very fascination with ordinary things that made her so mesmerizing. He wanted to sit at that table and share meaningless stories with her, or their favourite movies and meals, and dream jobs and vacation spots. He just wanted her voice in his ears. He needed it. Like lungs need oxygen. Like how they're useless without it.

THE BIGGEST LIE

June 18th, 2008,
Alex, Owen, and I on the way to the cabin.

My sister is watching the kids again, or, rather, living vicariously through them. Any chance to babysit Callie and Lucia and she'll take them like they're free gold, because my daughters are exactly what every expectant mother wishes for.
The best thing in my life is knowing they could not live without me. Being needed this way. Alex loves our children, but he doesn't know them like I do. Their favourite books and meals and animals and colours and places to go. I am their link to the world, they are experiencing it through me, and I know they are becoming who they are because of me. It is an astounding acknowledgement. I never question my purpose in life anymore, I am my children's porthole to their world. They will become who they are through me.

Alex and I are taking his brother up to the cabin for the weekend. Owen is hoping to get a lot of writing done, and Alex keeps boasting about how the place is perfect for that, as if he knew. As if he's written a few bestsellers himself. It's
funny, really. I remember watching an interview with Harry Crews, and Crews talked about a doctor he knew who said, “I'd write a novel too, if I had the time,” and Crews found that as presumptuous as a writer saying he was going to perform a heart transplant on Tuesday. Like anybody could do it if they “had the time.” It's not that doctors are haughty, or that Alex has no appreciation for the art and labour of writing, it's just, he thinks he is in touch with everything, yet he is living on his own planet most of the time. Assuming things, dismissing things. Important things. Because nothing is as important as his life and his needs and his job and the world he knows. Like being a doctor, and medicine, are the apex of civilization, even if one prefers literature or the farming life. Alex assumes a writer and a farmer are those things because they couldn't be a doctor. Like everyone would work ten-hour overnight shifts on Sundays if they could.

Owen and I have started to bond over rolled eyes at Alex's expense.

It's only just gotten normal having him live with us. I was so petrified at first, balancing being a wife who understands her husband wanting to help his brother, being a good mother thinking about what is best for her daughters, and my own personal feelings on having a supposedly recovered alcoholic, fresh out of rehab, just down the hall from where I sleep and shower. I mean, who wants a roommate at my age?Who wants to stop wearing their one-piece, cozy, purple pajamas to the kitchen table in the mornings?Who wants to have that many more dishes to wash every night?Who wants someone there asking what's wrong when you feel like lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling?

But then he showed up, scuffing his shoes off the mat outdoors before stepping into the porch, with his head down and a shy smile from ear to ear. I was expecting some madman to come
bursting into the house, boots still on, traipsing mud from room to room, with a look on his face that said “so what, get over it.”What does that say about me? The cutest thing so far is how he keeps his laundry, his juvenile boxers, in plastic Sobeys bags in the corner of his room. Like it'd be pornographic if I saw them in the hamper in the bathroom. He must wait until no one is home to wash them. I think it'd be funny if I didn't leave the house for a week straight, what would he do then? Go commando for a day? Turn a pair inside out?