The Far End of Happy (6 page)

Six weeks ago, in early September, Ronnie sought out Jeff to talk more about the divorce. As far as she knew, he hadn’t even secured legal representation, and Ronnie, who had already put off this decision way too long, wanted to formalize their separation. But she and the boys were having a typically crazy day. Even the pages of her journal couldn’t center her that day, the lists and notes in the margins outweighing the prose:
Finish bulk grain and seed purchase order for store, line up interviews for next article, muck horse stalls. (Why isn’t Jeff doing this anymore? Should we sell horses?)
To ensure his sobriety, she invited Jeff along for the ride to the day’s activities, round two: after-school Tae Kwon Do, a quick dinner, and parent-teacher night. He was all too willing to oblige.

Baiting him with the pretense of togetherness threatened the inner balance she’d fought for with years of journaling and weeks of counseling, but effective communication was impossible through alcohol’s haze. If manipulation was required to keep booze out of the equation that night, so be it.

But Jeff was so good at pulling her off the rails. To get through the night, she needed some small symbol of her commitment to self, something to fortify her through the few hours of playacting required. And so, after a moment of hesitation, she slipped off her wedding rings and left them in her jewelry box.

That evening, Ronnie sat with Jeff and Will in a line of folding chairs waiting for Andrew at Tae Kwon Do. As always, Ronnie watched the class. Jeff, apparently, was watching Ronnie.

“Where are your rings?”

For years he had ignored her in every way that counted; Ronnie was surprised he’d even noticed. She hadn’t meant to make a public statement. As kindly as she could, she said, “Let’s talk tonight, Jeff. At home, like we planned.”

After Tae Kwon Do, they got drive-through burgers and ate on the way to parent-teacher night. Ronnie—and Jeff too, she was sure—pretended to listen to the teachers and look at the projects on the wall, slapping smiles over twisting guts and draining hearts. When they finally got home and Jeff declined her invitation to join in on the boys’ bedtime rituals, she skipped reading the boys a book by promising two the next night.

Ronnie rejoined him in the living room. He sat on the love seat; she sat on the couch.

Jeff spoke first.

“I was going to shoot myself tonight.”

She wasn’t sure she heard him right. He wasn’t hysterical. He could have been saying,
I
was
going
to
watch
football, but the Eagles weren’t playing.
Ronnie couldn’t focus on the magnitude of what he was saying; she got stuck on the word “shoot.”

It only took another moment to add it up: he’d already come up with a plan, and it involved a gun.

“What do you mean, ‘I was going to’?”

“I wrote a note at work and put it in my pocket. I thought you’d find it when you did the wash, but it was still there when I put on my pants for work today.” All Ronnie could think was,
He
thinks
I
go
through
his
pockets?
Even the kids knew to police their own pockets before putting them in the laundry or face the potential loss of their contents. She didn’t have time for such nonsense.

“Come with me,” he said, leaning forward but not standing when Ronnie didn’t move.

She couldn’t. Her spinal fluid had turned into a thick, cold paste. The golden wall color they’d so carefully chosen—“Daybreak”—mocked them as the room took on a darker hue. “Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

Ronnie stalled. “How could you think of doing something like that? What about Andrew and Will?”

“They’ve always been your kids, not mine.”

What?
She and Jeff had wanted those boys so badly. After persevering through two miscarriages, they’d been so grateful when their sons arrived. And he’d lavished them with attention, changing diapers and cuddling with them and buying them toys they could play with together. When had all that changed?

“The boys will be fine,” he said, as if already speaking from the far side of the grave.

“Is that how you would have felt if your dad offed himself?
Fine?
” The air thinned; she panted for oxygen. “My god, Jeff, you gave them life! You’re wrong. They would never get over it.”

He shook his head, as if she were working from the wrong script. “You’ll help them through.”

The more Jeff had counted on Ronnie to keep their lives on track over the past few years, the more competent she’d felt—but she couldn’t imagine anyone powerful enough to help a child past such a horrific act.

“Let me show you something.”

She followed his lead through a living room abuzz with dangerous electricity, out the front door, and halfway down the walk. It was only as they left the yellow glow of the porch light and entered the night’s pitch that the hair on the back of Ronnie’s neck prickled.

“Where are we going?” she said.

“The store office.”

They started down the driveway, but the sudden dark and a light fog distorted her senses. Nothing looked right. For the first time, it occurred to Ronnie that the “something” he wanted to show her might be a gun.

“I’m not going any farther,” she said. If Jeff insisted on going to the store office, he was going alone.

Her footsteps crunched on the gravel as Ronnie ran back to the relative safety of the living room. The room for living. Her mind frantic, seeking options. They lived in a dark, secluded area. The pasture light that used to come on at dusk had been added to a fix-it list that was now impossibly long. The boys were up two flights of stairs. She couldn’t possibly get them out of the house before Jeff got back. She couldn’t think. Was he really violent?

The door latch clicked; Ronnie’s heart jumped as Jeff entered the room. He reached into his pocket. She pressed her back against the wall, breath ragged.
Oh
god, what if he has a gun?
When he withdrew his hand, he passed her what at first looked like a marshmallow. Two sheets of paper that had been folded over and over like the origami fortune-tellers she used to make as a child that told you who you were, what you liked, and who you loved. The edges were rounded, compressed, and worn—as if they had, indeed, been through the wash. He said, “Read it.”

Her knees would hold her no longer. She collapsed into a chair. The paper had grown brittle in the dryer. Tension mounted as she picked at it with shaking hands, carefully peeling back its layers. He stared at her as she read, making it harder to concentrate. The letter said he loved her, that she was the best thing in his life, and to please give his love to the boys. He said he hated his mother. He asked to be buried beside his father…

Ronnie went to the kitchen and got the dusty phone book down from the top shelf.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“You need to talk to somebody. There’s a suicide hotline—”

“I’m not talking to any hotline.”

“They have people trained to help you.” Lines and lines of numbers—how was she supposed to focus, to find the one she needed?

“I’m not going to talk to some stranger,” he said.

“Then call Paco.” Paco was the manager at the restaurant where Ronnie used to work, the only person Ronnie had ever thought of as Jeff’s buddy. A drinking buddy, when both men were single, and until they’d had kids. He’d stood up for Jeff at their wedding.

“I haven’t talked to him in years.”

“I go years between talking to some of my old friends too, but we always reconnect,” Ronnie said, continuing to flip through the phone book for that hotline. “He’d want you to call.”

“I’m not talking to him.”

“Jeff, you’re hurting.” Emotion welled in her throat. Somehow, in strengthening her resolve to leave her husband, she’d found a new reserve of compassion for him. “You need to talk to someone. I know you want it to be me, but it can’t be.”

Ronnie found the listing. She picked up the wall phone to dial. Jeff tore the receiver from her, then ripped the phone from the wall.

A hole gaped from the sheetrock they had so lovingly hung. Ronnie sank to the floor beneath it. Jeff crossed to the opposite side of the kitchen and did the same. Their backs against the oak cupboards they’d installed when Andrew was a baby.

They stared at each other for several minutes, Ronnie held hostage by choices she’d made when Jeff had seemed a different man. It had already been a long day, and as she sat there, the rush from its surprise ending began to wane.

“We’re at a stalemate,” she finally said. “Guess I’ll have to watch you all night because I will not have the boys tripping over your dead body on their way to the bus stop tomorrow.”

Ronnie sat with him for another fifteen minutes or so, not talking.
At
least
he’s not drinking.
Yet as the minutes dragged on, she saw the futility in this approach. She’d never be able to stay awake all night. How long could she guard Jeff? For the rest of their lives?

“Never mind.” Ronnie stood. “I’m going to bed.”

Ronnie washed her face and brushed her teeth but didn’t undress. Who was she kidding? No matter how exhausted she was, she’d never be able to relax into sleep with the threat of violence in the air. Her mind raced. She needed to get Jeff help, but how? She reached for the bedroom phone, but it wasn’t in its cradle. After looking all over the second floor, she found it where she had no doubt left it—on the sitting room bed. She tried to turn it on. Dead. Her cell phone was plugged in to charge at the store, where she left it every night. Why bother bringing it inside this fortress, where thick stone walls obscured a signal?

If only she could keep Jeff from drinking. Keep him talking. Distract him some way until she thought up a plan. Wondering what he was doing now, she slipped off her shoes and tiptoed down the stairs—but before she reached the kitchen, she heard the freezer drawer slide open and ice clunk against the side of a plastic mug. Then the front door. Jeff must have taken his drink to the porch so he could smoke.

She had to act fast. Holding her breath as she passed the kitchen window, just feet away from where Jeff probably sat, she descended again.

From her basement office, she called her therapist. Anita also worked at the Women in Crisis Center in Reading; she’d know what to do. Ronnie quickly apologized for the late hour—it was just past eleven thirty—and explained what was happening. Anita told her to hang up and call 911 and say that Jeff had threatened suicide and that she’d seen a note with his burial wishes detailed. “The note is important. Don’t forget,” she said.

Ronnie had been up since five a.m. With this flow and ebb of late-night adrenaline added on to weeks of turmoil, her vision was starting to blur with exhaustion. She anticipated the relief as she handed Jeff over to authorities better equipped to deal with the situation.

“Call now, Ronnie, and don’t leave him alone until someone arrives.”

What would she do if Jeff pulled a gun, fight him for it? She called the police and gave the prompted report. To head back up the stairs, she had to summon meager scraps of courage and pretend the rest. She hated to admit that she was afraid of the man who had been her lover for more than a decade. She recalled her brother Teddy’s words when she’d told him she was divorcing Jeff: “My god, Ronnie, we’ve known that family our whole lives. You’d think you’d know him by now.”

You’d think.

Ronnie forced a casual air as she walked onto the porch in her stocking feet and flopped onto the squashed cushions of the rusting glider beside Jeff’s chair. The way his eyes lit up for a moment, as they always had when she walked into a room, ignited a small explosion in her heart.

“I thought you were going to bed.” His words were slurring. How could that be? She’d only left him alone a short while.

“How am I supposed to sleep after what you said tonight?”

They sat for a half hour or so while Jeff added his cigarette smoke to a fog already determined to choke them off from the rest of the world. Beneath Ronnie, the glider creaked a distress signal into the night. Each stared off in a different direction. She still couldn’t look at him. He’d see right through her. Ronnie’s inadequate acting skills were the reason she never went along when the IRS audited Jeff; she’d trigger a bullshit meter a full block away. Let him try to defend his own shoddy tip reporting.

The lulling rhythm of the glider, the relinquishment of demands to silence, the booze—she wasn’t sure why, but soon Jeff relaxed into his chair. On the table beside him, ice cubes melted at the bottom of the mug. Jeff used to make his Manhattans in squat “rocks” glasses, as any commercial bartender would. But for the past few years, he’d been making them in plastic beer mugs “so he wouldn’t have to get up as often.” Ronnie did the math. Chances were he was drinking nine to twelve shots of liquor on his nights off.

For once, she was glad he was impaired. Ronnie no longer feared any sudden movements. As she looked out into the night, an occasional wing caught the porch light as bats swooped down for bugs.

After a while, she sneaked a sideways glance; he’d let his glasses slide down on his nose. Why didn’t he push them up?

Creak. Creak.
Each crepitation ticked off another second until help arrived.

Finally, the first pop of gravel beneath tires in the driveway. Jeff leaned forward; he’d heard it too. Soon headlights advanced around the corner of the porch.

“Who on earth—?”

Ronnie felt blame’s spotlight seeking her out.

Another moment and the full length of the state police cruiser came into view. An evening that began with the removal of wedding rings had resulted in the arrival of police. Ronnie felt, for a moment, that it was her offense that was actionable.

She finally hazarded a look in Jeff’s direction. His eyes were like weapons trained over the top of his glasses. Words sloshed around in his mouth before he spit them toward Ronnie: “I will
never
forgive you for this.”