Once More With Feeling

  I tried to shake the feeling off – maybe it was some kind of intimacy hangover from all those days with Brooke, I thought, which was only to be expected, really – and stripped out of my travel clothes. I did this in the bathroom, not the bedroom, as I still couldn’t shake the creepy feeling I got showing any kind of skin near that poor, abused bed. I ignored the unpleasant sensation this morning, and turned on the heated tiles in the bathroom floor to combat the chill as I pulled off my clothes. I wanted to wear something else, something new. Something that wasn’t that blue hoodie that I’d been forced to don again for the trip back to Rivermark and which, after a week of wearing Brooke’s lovely and stylish clothes instead, made me feel disgusting. I threw it in the corner of the bathroom, watching it land between the hamper and the wastebasket, as if it were an emblem of my indecision. As if it were taunting me. Toss it or clean it? I told myself I would decide its fate later.

  And, of course, mine.

  Then I walked into the closet, and scowled at my clothes. Nothing appealed to me. It all seemed like so many costumes, suddenly. Brooke’s clothes had felt that way too, but the difference was, there was a large part of me that wanted to play the role of fabulous New York editor, complete with family money and an addiction to truly delectable boots. There was a whole lot less of me that was interested in reprising the role of Rivermark DWI lawyer and oblivious wife to a cheating husband. I flicked through the racks of my workday suits and the shelves of upscale yoga wear I usually wore for Saturday errands and the occasional class. It was all fine. It was all nice enough. But it didn’t feel like me, suddenly, and I thought I should pay attention to that feeling. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world to start a voyage of discovery with the knowledge only of who I wasn’t. It was a start.

  I ended up making do with a pair of jeans I’d bought a very long time ago because I’d seen them in a store window and had then never felt they were entirely appropriate, because they were more rocker than respectable, and then I dug out a very old pair of Frye motorcycle boots that I’d bought in a vintage store in Brooklyn back in college. After that, the long-sleeved T-shirt and sleek v-neck sweater I pulled on seemed that much more cool. Or maybe not cool at all, but a lot less that person who hijacked my life and a little more the person I was supposed to be. It was the little things, I told myself with more pride than the situation warranted, and then I marched back downstairs and drove to the hospital. It might be barely nine in the morning, but I felt more in control than I had since I’d walked in on the two of them months before.

  Because I was still Tim’s wife. And so these were still my responsibilities. I figured that should matter to someone.

  And that someone might as well be me.

  No one I recognized was in the waiting room, and the nurses were all distracted when I walked toward the ICU desk, so I kept right on walking toward Tim’s little cubicle. I tiptoed in and peeked around the curtain, and then froze in my tracks right there.

  Carolyn was slumped in the visitor’s chair next to Tim’s bed, her head tipped back to rest against the back of it. Her eyes were closed, as if she might have slept like that. She looked drawn and exhausted even so, her dyed ink-black hair making her seem washed out without the makeup she usually wore to go with it. She’d pulled Tim’s hand over from his bed and had rested it against her belly, palm down, and then covered it with both of her hands.

  It was a striking family tableau. It was incredibly intimate. Unsettling. It was the sort of moment that should have been private. That should have been something only they knew had ever happened. A secret smile that was only theirs. It was that poignant. And Tim’s machines sang a little song all around them, as if in accompaniment.

  I had never felt more discarded. More alone.

  I backed out of the room and then made my way out into the main corridor. I didn’t know why my head was spinning. Why I felt charred through, down to bone and ash. Why it hurt—

  But of course I did. I knew exactly why.

  It was one thing to think of them having sex – to have seen them having sex – all passion and physicality and that animalistic grunting. A quiet moment was much worse. A soft sort of moment that said all kinds of things I didn’t care to know about them. About their feelings for each other. Or about Carolyn’s feelings for Tim, anyway. And her feelings about her baby.

  For a terrifying moment, I thought I might be sick, right there on the squeaky hospital floor. But I breathed through it. Again and again, until the spinning faded and I could start walking.

  Right, I thought, trying to sound brisk even inside my own head. Perhaps you can check in on your responsibilities later, when there’s less chance of heaving all over the floor.

  If I could, I would have reached in and scrubbed that image out of my head. With my very own hands. I noted the swish of the ICU doors behind me, but I didn’t stop walking until I heard my name.

  She said it again and I turned, determined to smile as if I hadn’t seen anything and if I had, that it hadn’t shaken me so profoundly. It occurred to me that I had had entirely too many conversations with Carolyn in this same goddam hallway. I would be thrilled when this strange interlude in all of our lives was over. When we could have whatever interactions were left us once the dust of all this settled somewhere – anywhere – but here.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Carolyn asked. If I’d been asked, I would have described her tone and expression as suspicious. Unduly suspicious, in fact. I blinked.

  ‘What do you think I’m doing here?’ I asked. More curiously than aggressively. Because surely there could only be one reason for my presence. The same old reason there’d always been.

  ‘I can’t imagine.’ She sniffed. ‘You told me to text you if he woke up, and he hasn’t, so …?’

  I fought to keep myself from rolling my eyes, from playing further into this, from contributing to this mess in all the ways I could see, now, that I’d been doing from the start. The facts were very clear here. There was no getting around what Carolyn had done. If she felt guilty about it, well, she would have indicated that in some way by now. She hadn’t. Ergo, my attempts to play the martyr so that she would be forced to feel bad were, at best, a whole lot of misplaced energy on my part.

  ‘Mom said you were in New York with that Brooke person,’ Carolyn continued, apparently totally unaware that I was having a breakthrough adult moment mere feet from her. ‘No one expected you back for months. I thought the two of you would disappear into that little fantasy world of yours and stay there.’

  I blinked again. ‘There’s a whole lot to unpack there,’ I said slowly. ‘And I’m not really up to the challenge. I think I’ll just point out that you don’t really know Brooke—’

  ‘Are you checking up on me?’ Carolyn demanded, cutting me off and taking a step closer. I saw that her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. ‘Are you here to confirm all your worst impressions about me? Or is it that you honestly can’t believe that I could ever do something that you did? That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘I just got back into town, Carolyn.’ I kept my voice low. I felt as if I’d accidentally ripped the lid off of some intense internal battle of hers, and the last thing I wanted was for it to bubble over and drown us both where we stood. ‘I have no particular agenda here.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ If anything, her fists seemed to clench harder. Tighter. ‘You wouldn’t know how to take your next breath without an agenda!’

  I raised my hands in the air. I also might have smirked, which definitely didn’t help the situation. But I stepped away from her, which I thought made up for it.

  ‘Okay,’ I said in a soothing tone – a smirky soothing tone, I could admit. ‘I think maybe you’re having a blood sugar moment. You need to consider the possibility that I don’t care about you or what you’re doing at all. And that I came here purely to see how Tim is doing. That’s my entire agenda, if I have one at all.’

  ‘What the hell do you care?’ she threw at m
e, her voice shaking, making me wonder how many imaginary fights she’d been having with me in my absence. ‘You’re the one who stormed out of here over a week ago. What? Did all that time in Manhattan reliving your glory days remind you that you had some unfinished business to take care of?’

  I rocked back on my heels. I felt like her anger was some kind of hot wind, swirling over me and around me, but I didn’t have to stand there and take it. I really didn’t. I could … step away from the weather. I didn’t have to be the sort of person who scrapped with her sister in a hallway over the same man. I didn’t have to live this trashy, skanky reality-show life, no matter if it happened to be mine. I could remove myself from this situation. Because who in their right mind would put up with this? I’d just seen what she was fighting for, very much against my will. But what was I doing here?

  Besides, she had a point. If not the one she thought she had.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said then, ignoring the mounting colour on her face and the murderous way she was looking at me – not even really caring about either, if I were honest – ‘I do have some unfinished business. Thank you, Carolyn, for reminding me.’

  And then I walked out of the hospital, climbed into the car, pointed it toward Vermont, and drove.

  *

  It was a remarkably easy, pretty drive.

  After a quick stop at the house, I headed out of Rivermark, taking the back roads through old Dutch farmlands toward the famously tight curves of the Taconic Parkway. Eventually I headed east, leaving New York state behind and crossing over into Massachusetts. Once I hit Route 91 a little bit north of Springfield, I started the drive toward the great frozen north that was Vermont.

  Goldilocks was going to check out one other life before she made her final decision about what to do about the one she had. One other discarded possibility. I owed it to myself, didn’t I?

  All around me stretched fields and farms, woods and hills, framed by pines and birches and open, empty branches on trees that looked cold and bare. The drive up was like a tour through my favourite Edith Wharton novel: stark farmhouses silhouetted against the winter, the frozen earth forbidding yet picturesque, and chimneys sketching faint hints of warmth and cheer against the sky. It was beautiful, of course, in that solitary way of winter, but it was also somehow exhilarating. As I raced along the ever lonelier stretch of highway, cutting through the heart of New England, I found myself singing along with the satellite radio. The day wore on and the light began to get thinner, colder even as it bounced back at me as bright as ever from the piles of snow at the sides of the road.

  I knew the route by heart. I told myself that was because it was simple, and because I’d always had a head for directions. Both of those things were true. Also true was the fact I hadn’t been up here in a long time, but there was no forgetting the way, for some reason, as if the map were burned into my brain. Once I crossed the state border into Vermont I was about halfway there. I couldn’t quite sit still.

  I hadn’t thought about Alec in so long. Brooke had indicated that she thought I wasn’t being entirely honest about that, but I really hadn’t. No idle imaginings. No late nights on the computer, innocently typing his name into Google. No random daydreams while I was going about my day-to-day life. I’d had strange phases where I’d thought about other old boyfriends – a rather overly optimistic term to use to describe some of the situations I’d subjected myself to in my college days and shortly thereafter, when I’d often mistaken smirks for signs of intelligent life where, sadly, none could hope to grow – but I hadn’t thought about Alec. I hadn’t not thought about him either – there wasn’t some big blank spot in my memory that I tiptoed around or anything. I knew perfectly well that he was the doctor I’d dated as he’d finished his fellowship in New York, and before he’d left to work at a clinic in a war-torn African nation. But that was pretty much all I ever thought, on the few occasions I thought about him at all.

  Yet here I was. Following a third-party text into the winter wonderland of Vermont, to drop in unexpectedly on a man who could, for all I knew, have a wife and six kids by now. In fact, it would be highly unlikely that he didn’t.

  I remembered, then, all those snooty Ivy League girls who’d crowded around him when I’d first met him, competing with each other over their impressive vocabularies and stylish glasses, with names like Madeline and Elise, who’d raised their eyebrows at me over their very intellectual black turtlenecks and murmured to Alec about the latest opera, the newest art exhibit, the exciting new literary tome. He had been like catnip for brainy girls back then, and I’d certainly had my share of insecurities about it, especially centred around his most significant ex-girlfriend, a nightmare made all of gazelle-like limbs and self-possession coupled with an array of degrees and complementary languages. And possibly a Fulbright thrown in there too, for good measure. Audrey, her name had been. Of course. Slightly off-beat, supernaturally confident and entirely too erudite by all accounts.

  I’d never met her but God, I’d hated her.

  I forced my attention back to the present and reminded myself that it didn’t matter if Alec had in fact married the loathsome Audrey and if together they’d created a veritable Jolie–Pitt-like menagerie of international tots to call their very own. I was only conducting another deposition here. I was only looking for the significant facts of my own life. Not because I doubted my own memory, but because I didn’t entirely trust it. And because I thought that having a different perspective on how I’d gotten here would make the fact that my life really was a bad afternoon talk show better somehow. Or different.

  Anyway, it couldn’t make it worse.

  I pulled the car off the smooth expanse of 91 at the familiar exit. I followed the pretty little road into the tiny town, which consisted of no more than a gas station, a general store, a drugstore that was also a restaurant, and a grocery. Nothing had changed since the last time I’d been here, almost ten years ago. It was like driving into a painting. The winter shadows were starting to pull long, and the December sun seemed bigger and more golden as it made its way toward the trees. I turned off the main street and headed up into the rolling slope of hills. There were famous ski slopes not far in all directions, I knew, but this little town’s only claim to fame was its picturesque New England charm. Which was considerable, to be sure.

  I saw the farmhouse first. It sprawled across the hillside, the main building bright white even against the surrounding snow. There were two outbuildings: one which had once been a working barn and one which might still be working stables, for all I knew. I pulled the car into the cleared area in front of the house, sucked in a breath, and then climbed out.

  It was impossibly quiet. And stunningly cold. I stood for a moment processing that, glad I’d changed into my winter boots again before leaving Rivermark earlier. I could hear the shiver of wind high in the branches of the trees all around me and in the darkening woods behind the house, and the faint melody of wind chimes, though I couldn’t see the source. There was no traffic, no sound of any trains in the distance, nothing at all but snow and silence and what was left of the sun. I took a breath so deep it made my lungs hurt. Cold and sweet and clean straight down to the bone.

  I climbed up the steps to the door and rang the bell. As I waited, I noted the beat-up old truck near the barn with snow piled up all over it and a dark-coloured Grand Cherokee closer to the farmhouse itself, that one scraped clean. But there were no sounds from inside. I shoved my hands in my pockets and rethought my plan, such as it was. As I stepped back off the porch, I couldn’t help but take a moment to look at the view spread out before me: smudges of blue and green and a sea of sparkling frozen white in all directions. From halfway up the hillside there was nothing to see but the far hills and the woods all around, and the cosy town snuggled up on both sides of the river that cut along the valley floor. It was gorgeous. And down below the house there was a figure shovelling snow from the surface of what was, if memory served, a small pond
in summertime. I must have driven right past it on my way to the house.

  Past him.

  I set off down the lane rather than take my chances on the field and in untouched snow that could, for all I knew, come up to my waist if I tried to walk on it. As I drew closer to the pond, the figure stopped shovelling, and waited. Watched me approach.

  It occurred to me that what I was doing was actually, certifiably insane. Who dropped by unexpectedly to see an ex-boyfriend seven years later? No one who didn’t also boil a bunny or two in her spare time. I knew better than this kind of behaviour. Every woman who’d survived her twenties knew better than this.

  But it was too late.

  I could see him now, and I was certain he could see me, too. I could feel it, like a kind of electric charge in the frigid air.

  He rested his hands on the handle of the shovel as he watched me come closer. He wore his jacket open over an untucked flannel shirt, and his gloves were cocked back to show slivers of tanned skin at his strong wrists. His jeans looked a thousand years old, and were tucked carelessly into the tops of his boots. He was still that same rangy kind of lean. His mouth was still serious in a way that made me want to lick it, though I hated myself for the thought, and his dark eyes were still so clever, so fascinating, as they took me in. His hair was on the shaggy side today, a riot of colours like an experiment in shades of tawny, and disarmingly haphazard. Pay too much attention to his often-silly hair, I knew, and you might find yourself blindsided by the thrust of his intellect. It was one among his many weapons.

  I stepped onto the cleared ice of the pond. At the other end, he tossed down his shovel, and started toward me. As he moved, he pulled off his gloves, one and then the other, and then shoved them both in the pockets of his open parka.

  It was still so quiet. It felt something like ominous, so at odds was it with the tumult inside me and the alarms that blared there, the riot of sound and fury I wanted to pretend wasn’t happening.

  Off in the distance, a dog barked enthusiastically, and it sounded far too intrusive against the blanket of noiselessness: almost shocking. I wanted to look and see what it was barking at – to look away, at anything else, at anything at all but him – but I couldn’t seem to move so much as a muscle. There was only Alec, all these years later, walking towards me in that way of his, so distractingly loose-limbed with that suggestion of athletic ease in every step. There was only that same impossibly intelligent face of his, older now, more weathered, but still entirely too compelling.