Away From Everywhere Read online

  That day was the only time he’d ever been aware of his own heart beating in his chest and the architecture of his every muscle. He kissed her, and felt some part of him leave his body, enter hers, and come back to him better than it had left him. He watched her finger rub tiny circles just above where he was inside of her, and the sight was so potent he had to look away or finish too soon.

  A cloud must have shifted, and a bright beam of light burst in through the living room window. It poured itself across the floor, crept up her left leg, crawled up her smooth white belly, and illuminated her bare chest. It made the scar on her breast glisten red. It was the first time he’d ever seen it. He ran his thumb gently across it – it felt glossy against the smoothness of her skin – and his face exploded into tears. He fell into her arms and wept without explanation. He didn’t have one to offer. After a few minutes, she plucked the deflated condom from his flaccid penis, threw it on the floor, and shimmied back onto the couch to better cradle him, combing his hair with her fingers and humming shhhhh shh shh shhhh, shhhhh shh shh shhhh .

  She tore him back into the present. “It’s a charade,Owen, a lie. We are lying to ourselves now … and that is tainting this beautiful thing we had. It’s just. Every day of this takes away another memory of how it was.”

  She looked up from the floor and met his eyes. “I don’t want to come out of this relationship with more bad memories than good, and I want to think fondly of you,Owen. You know I’m right, right? This has to turn itself around or end.”

  At this point, neither of them cared enough for another argument or conversation about it/that/us . They had spent eight and a half years together in utter bliss, and then another half year pretending, faking bliss, clinging to what was, and ignoring the inevitable signs of their demise. They were going to bed at different times and only selectively listening to the details of each other’s days, and they seemed cold and indifferent to each other when one of them burned an arm on a hot pan or had a bad flu. Their problems were redundant now, and the fighting seemed habitual and unproductive, yet they loved each other enough to be crushed by knowing they were drifting apart. Residual love and a plethora of fond memories made a mess of them: they were a composite of yesterdays too intricately woven to be pulled apart.

  She stormed off to their bedroom and slammed the door shut behind her. Although Owen never knew what it was he was doing wrong, it still pained him to hear her in tears behind a closed door. It was a heartache he felt in his throat and teeth, like a dry cry. She wept so wildly at times that she hyperventilated, and one night he heard her throw up, violently, as if she were throwing up her heart. She was precious, too precious for tears, and every sob she wept hacked into Owen. Blows from a rusted axe. She said it was his lack of presence in their relationship that got to her, but he didn’t know how to make himself more there .

  He stood on the other side of the door and listened to her haul a dresser drawer open, as she always did. She’d always dig out a small scrap of paper Owen had given her when they first met, some prose on how much she’d meant to him. She’d throw it in his face like it was a lie, like he’d deceived her, on purpose. Like he never once meant those words.Youmademe feel invincible,Owen…and perfect for someone…You made me believe in, inyou…and us…and ….

  The only difference on this night was that he could hear her tearing the note into a thousand little squares, and the sound of it felt like she had scissors shredding their way through his heart. Each rip was so definite and final and symbolic of her commitment to move on and find what he was denying her.

  He grabbed the door handle.

  “Don’t , Owen!” She grabbed the handle on the other side of the door and pressed all her weight against it. He heard her nails click off the hollow wood of the door, and he placed his hand where he imagined hers to be. Her fingers still killed him: so thin and feminine they bent at each knuckle.

  “Just …leave me alone, okay? Just …go …for now.”

  He walked back out to the living room and threw himself down into the computer chair. It slid a few feet, and the wheels against hardwood rolled like thunder. For weeks now, he’d exhausted himself trying to pinpoint why they were falling apart, how something once so flawless was now nothing but flawed. He wheeled himself back over to the computer and flicked the mouse to turn off the screensaver: a slideshow of photos on their computer, years literally flashing before him. What he saw was a photo of them on a three-day hike in Gros Morne National Park, running away from everything in the world but each other. Her with a thin, bright blue scarf wrapped around her head like a veil to keep the insects out, him the same, in an extra scarf she had. A pink one. Any chance we can swap colours? She giggled and shook her head. You look too cute in pink.

  There was nothing that day but the crunch of detritus beneath their feet and immaculate, unspoiled scenery. They hadn’t seen another person in forty-eight hours. There was something about seeing her all rugged there ahead of him on the trail, ravaged by the elements – frizzy hair and a sunburned face – and still trucking through the trees with an oversized backpack hiding everything but her legs. A frying pan, tied on to her pack, slapped gently off the backs of her thighs with every step, except when she’d turn around and smile at him, maybe every tenth step, just checking that he was still there. A smile and a look that meant she needed him to be there.

  He wanted to run down the hall and ask Abbie if she remembered that trip – how he’d convinced her to take a roll in the wildflowers with him that day, and they laid a blanket down, and when they took it up off the ground forty-five minutes later there were three colourful butterflies squat dead beneath it and she was mortified. But he stayed in the chair, he stayed away like she’d asked. He opened his computer, because writing was the only way he knew how to process his thoughts. To write them out and see them for what they were:

  write them out and see them for what they were: How, and why, has love taken what it was supposed to give us? The fire is still there between us, endless beautiful memories make it flicker, but with no wood left, no fuel, what keeps fire alive? With no hope for the future, what keeps love alive? Memories aren’t enough.

  I love the Jason Molina lines:

  “We are proof

  That the heart

  Is a risky fuel to burn.

  What’s left after that’s all gone

  I hope to never learn.

  But if you stick with me

  You can help me

  I’m sure we’ll find new things to burn.

  Because we are proof, that the heart, is a risky fuelto burn.”

  What is left when it’s all gone? What is left of me now?

  Madly in love with Abbie Darenberg, I let myself believe nothing else mattered. There was nothing on earth worthwhile but her, and us, wrapped up on thecouch watching a movie. And now, free-falling out of love, suddenly everything matters. Painfully. The job I don’t have, the degrees I never finished, the family we’ll never have. If she was everything to me, what is there without her?

  Take the bones from a body and watch it fall useless to the floor. I put her where my bones once were, in my veins and arteries as my blood. Life happens so slowly that we never feel ourselves changing until we’ve changed so much we cannot recognize who we once were. It’s all there in that picture of course, us in pink and blue scarves and alone in the world, but those two people, that moment, it’s all dead and gone and alive only in a photo – a deceitful piece of glossy paper.

  I won’t know myself without her. I will have shattered who I could have been in being with her. I want nothing but who she was, when I was who I was. How does time spill in between two people like that? Put a stream, and then an ocean between them?

  Abbie was thirty-one, and their age difference was rearing its hideous face. She was envisioning a future and Owen was revealing himself as more of an obstacle than a part of that future. When she saw a cute little girl in a coffee shop now, or watched a proud new mother pushing a
carriage, she thought of having her own children. He knew it in the way she clutched his arm, smiled, and nodded at the child.

  She’d gone back to university to get a better job, so I can provide for a child , and at this point she had just about finished her nursing degree and she resented him for dropping out of university two years ago to take his writing more seriously.

  “You were loving geology, you were getting letters from the department congratulating you for the straight A’s, and you were all giddy about it. Remember? I don’t get it! You have a closet full of goddamn rocks in plastic cases. Labeled. You’d tell me the differences, why rose quartz is pink not white, and why shale breaks so easily. You loved it. People don’t just–”

  “Loved . I loved it. And now I don’t. Well, I do. I have an interest in geology, but not in a career in geology. I’d have no time for writing, and I’d be away too much, you know?”

  “You’ve got to think about your future,Owen. If you can’t see into your future, you’re never going to get anywhere.”

  “I am thinking about my future! I’m trying to avoid locking myself into a fucken cage of a life.”

  “You’re such a kid sometimes, you know that? Look at your brother, he’s happy, he’s getting a life set up. He just got married and is quite excited about–”

  “If you think my brother is a happy man, you’re an idi

  you you don’t know the guy.”

  “Oh, what? Just because he doesn’t hate the world or quote from Walden he doesn’t know what ‘true happiness’ is? Is that it?”

  Owen raised his eyebrows, like,Well, yes. Sort of.

  Shaking her head, furious, taking her supper out to the computer desk to eat it alone.“This isn’t about Alex, you always steer the conversation off track to deflect me!”

  He shouted at her back, “Actually, you’re the one who brought up Alex.”

  “It’s not about Alex!”she howled.“It’s about me being stuck in a relationship with some dispirited kid!”

  He felt the barrage of exclamation marks.

  “Why can’t you just admit you only want me to stay on the geology track for the money? Admit it, and I will. Admit it and I’ll play the fucken game and get buddy-buddy with all the right people and name-drop my way into an ideal job and buy you a wedding ring that puts all your friends’ to shame. Just fucken admit it and I’ll throw my goddamn life away for a backyard swimming pool and gaudy, oversized wedding r–”

  She threw her fork at him, a bit of steak still attached. It knocked a picture frame off the wall and the glass shattered, the image no longer visible beneath fractured shards. They spent the rest of the night in different rooms. It was journalism that Owen really wanted to do, but that was offered only in Stephenville, a ten-hour drive away from Abbie.

  They went to Blockbuster to rent a movie. What one of them picked up, the other rolled their eyes at.

  “Let’s just go home, I’m sure there’s something on TV. We’ll have some Jiffy Pop and root beer?”

  He smiled and nodded. He knew he still loved the girl by the way her adoration of Jiffy Pop and root beer made him laugh. The specifics of who she was. The familiarity he couldn’t let go of, for fearing of losing himself along with her.

  When they crawled into bed that night, Owen sensed the sort of paused silence that meant a serious conversation was coming. She was merely organizing her thoughts and arranging the words into a short punchy order. She couldn’t accept his abandoning university and had lost interest in his writing when it became clear he might never earn a living from it. Then it was just a waste of time he should be spending on a degree, or at least a better job. It came up in bed that night.

  “I’m a writer, Abbie. My day job is secondary, and the more time I spend writing the better quality–”

  “Are you?” She finally let herself say it. “What have you published,Owen, besides some shorts in a few lit journals that you never even got paid for? Call yourself a writer when you start earning a stable income from it, okay? All right!”

  “Not everything’s about money. And maybe one in a thousand published writers actually make a living from–”

  “And life isn’t a fucken fairytale. So keep your head in the clouds, Owen, try your little heart out, but don’t consider yourself noble, consider yourself a fool.”

  She rolled over and hauled all the blankets off of him. The room was cold, but he didn’t bother tugging some back. Her sudden lack of support silenced them both. She cried herself to sleep again, and Owen waited for her to fall asleep before reaching for his notepad and heading out to the living room. If they were going to break up, he could at least fuel his writing with the emotions and insight into love that their demise evoked. But she rolled over as he was getting up, and she spoke with no reluctance, spieling it all out in one rant.

  “When I look at you, I see a dispirited kid going nowhere. Another dark wannabe writer. Definitely not husband and father material. Your depressive nature has become a chore, a flaw I falsely assumed I could fix, or something I initially attributed to your mother’s death that I assumed you’d get over, like … like Alex has. And, initially, you had this refreshing, quixotic, and atypical approach to life that was endearing. Now, at our age…or my age, I guess…it’s just pathetic. You’re in no position to provide for a child, and don’t seem to be heading in that direction. It’s not like we haven’t tried or fought for us, Owen, but I just can’t picture us five years from now. I can’t see you tucking our daughter and all her friends into a minivan and taking them to the movies.”

  A few weeks later, after they’d broken up, he walked over to the university to buy a newspaper and to sit and circle apartment ads. There was a lost, first-year blonde sitting on the same dated, burgundy-carpeted bench. She was cute, an awkward and shy studious blonde, not the supermodel type. She was drawing cats and flowers in an exercise book next to a math problem she couldn’t solve. She doubted herself, he could tell. She could figure it out if she tried, but lacked the confidence to bother with it.

  Sitting there on that bench, surrounded by eager students, academic jabbering, and posters recruiting students to study abroad or volunteer for psychology experiments, Owen questioned why he’d ever left Memorial University. He thought it was as simple as no programs that interested him, but in that moment he realized it was something more profound. Indifference. An indifference to something those hundreds of students hovering around him were so mindlessly dedicating their every thought to, like bees at work in a hive, questioning nothing.

  And maybe it was an even more profound revelation that he wasn’t one of them. And maybe his grandfather had been right that day, about him and his father. This world is going to bend you out of shape until it breaks you…there’s no room for your type here, boy.

  As he walked home, he found himself fixated on Abbie’s “new friend at work,”Adam Fleisher. Weeks ago,Owen pulled up in front of the hospital and watched them laughing together in the porch, her hand on his shoulder fit perfectly into the groove of his collarbone, like hands that knew where they lay. Days later it was, Oh, it’s okay. Adam can drive me home. You needn’t come get me. Three nights back she was explaining her situation with Owen to Adam on the phone, not too quietly. No. I’ve told him he’s fine here until he finds somewhere new. No, I haven’t seen him try and find a place, Adam, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t looking! You don’t understand, we have a relationship that extends beyond ex-boyfriend-girlfriend.

  He got home and turned the key to what was now her apartment. He started supper, and as the peppers fried and the chicken seared, he dialed a phone number he’d jotted down off a telephone pole he’d noticed on Water Street while he was walking home: Downtown Appt. Available Immediately.

  Available immediately was all he needed to see. He was done torturing himself with the awkwardness of sleeping on Abbie’s couch while Adam slept in her bed. She had given him a reasonable period of time to get out of her apartment before she started letti
ng Adam spend the night. Sometimes he heard them moaning, and the bedsprings grinding into the bedframe. The images interfered with his breathing. Rage, coated in a sadness that made a pulp of his lungs. He pictured how she looked seconds before an orgasm, so free and lost in a place only he could take her for those nine years they were together, her eyes open but shut, silently screaming. And now Adam was that man.

  He thought of how she was a link to his mother, at least in some small inarticulate way. He would miss her most in the mornings: how cold the room would be and how warm her body was. He wrapped himself around her every morning to warm himself before crawling out of bed. The days would be that much colder now without her. He’d miss that little purr she made when he wrapped his arms around her to wake her on Monday mornings. She slept naked and looked so pristine and innocent as he kissed her forehead and crawled out of bed. To Owen, nothing was more attractive than a woman comfortable in her body like that.

  He thought back to that overheard conversation between his mother and their neighbour … Nancy? How it was the empty bed that got to his mother too, as it now would him. There would be an emptiness now, a physical nothingness beside him. Shouting. A longing and melancholy that would nip at him like a pest every time he rolled over and she wasn’t there.