“Kieran, you’ve gotten where you are because you work hard at it. Take a deep breath,” I suggest, and I inhale deeply, to model the behavior.
And nearly jump out of my skin, because I smell Wyatt.
Sugar and sunlight and something expensive. I yank my hand out of Kieran’s and turn around like I’m being hunted.
“Dawn?” Kieran asks, but his voice sounds like it’s coming from miles away.
I’m tangled in white sheets, in his arms. I am pulling his shirt around me like a robe. I breathe him in all around me.
The Ancient Egyptians believed that when a god came in its true form, there was an irresistible aroma. In the creation scene of the female king Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, Hatshepsut’s mother conceives when Amun comes to her. Even though Amun is taking the form of her husband, she knows he is really a god, because of his scent.
I feel Kieran’s hands on my shoulders, shaking me back to reality. “Dawn? Are you okay?”
I want to be strong for him, the way I have been for years now. But to my shock, my eyes fill with tears. “No. I don’t think so.”
He drags me deeper into the men’s department. He finds the fitting room, tugs me inside, and closes the door behind us. “What the hell is going on?”
I am shaking so hard that I cannot stop. Once I open my mouth, the words pour forth like an inundation. I tell him about Gita and Brian and the fight we had the night of Meret’s birthday. I tell him everything, beginning with the moment I left home and ending with Brian behind me, staring over my shoulder at Wyatt’s face on a screen.
I tell him I’ve made a mistake.
“You mean looking up Wyatt,” he clarifies, and I shake my head.
“How many times have I heard Brian talk about alternative universes?” I pick at a thread on the bottom of a coat hanging behind me. “It’s like I’ve opened Pandora’s box…inside my mind. I can’t unsee it.”
“Unsee what?”
“What my life might have been.”
My neck prickles with shame. What mother, what wife admits this? The only solace I have is that Kieran can’t possibly hate me any more than I hate myself right now.
But he doesn’t tell me I’m a monster. He curls his hand around mine. He squeezes. He waits for me to squeeze back. When I don’t, he tries again, and then I respond, and suddenly, there’s a beat between us. Thready, erratic…but present.
I look into his face, seeing the boy he was when he cried himself to sleep after our mother died, the teenager who delivered the valedictory address, the man who’d just suffered his first heartbreak. “You,” I say, “are going to be a great doctor.”
Kieran lifts his hand and I think he’s going to stroke my hair or my cheek, the child caring for the adult. Instead, he reaches behind me to the coat that is hanging on the dressing room wall. He flicks his finger to turn the price tag, and smiles wryly. “Fuck this,” he says. “Let’s go to T.J.Maxx.”
—
I thought about you whenever I painted. When I went to a museum. I wondered how you told the story of us, how different it was from the way I framed our story. To you, I was there one minute and then I was gone. You probably think that I stopped loving you. You didn’t realize that the reason I left was because I loved you too much.
I didn’t want to be a cliché and I didn’t want you to be one either. But mostly, I didn’t want to be the one left behind, and the only way to ensure that is to be the one who leaves. I kept thinking about your wife, about how she would feel if in the end you were mine. It was too easy to put myself in her shoes. I couldn’t let myself be the reason you made a woman feel that way, so whether I stayed or not, I lost.
I lied to you, before. I told you that I could see you in the future and me in the future but not the two of us. This is not true. I did see us together, the very best of us, for fifteen years—in the face of our son.
This is the part where you are allowed to hate me—because not only did I keep him from you, but I also kept you from him, and now it is too late to fix. His name was Arlo and he had your blue eyes and height and my crooked front tooth. He loved Dixie ice cream cups, but only the chocolate half; he hated peas. He couldn’t draw a straight line, so much for genetic artistic ability. He was not easy—but that only meant that when he decided to love you, it mattered more. I think maybe that he was born with fire instead of blood.
I guess you could say he got that from both of us.
Was. Got.Past tense. You noticed, I’m sure. The reason I know that you and I in tandem were not sustainable is because of Arlo. Whatever it was that raged in him could be soothed, but only for snatches of time. First, a toy. A piece of candy. A hug. But as he got older, the only thing that could lift him from himself were drugs.
He died three years ago.
I used to imagine him, walking the streets of Boston, and you, walking wherever you are, somehow being able to feel each other through the thickness of this planet. Like an echo in your footsteps, or a tremble in your pulse.
I used to imagine this because I can’t bear to think that you never knew he existed. And it’s all my fault.
—
