Away From Everywhere Read online

  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’sfunny, 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 comebursting 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?

  I feel a little vile for being such a bitch about it at first. If anything, things are a little livelier around here lately, and the kids have really taken to him, and that seems good for him.Even Alex says so. I think Alex himself is surprised at how benign Owen’s presence is in the house. He just sits in his room, writing away on that little black laptop of his, about a nun nursing a junkie back to health, but the junkie is showing the nurse how she’s as much a slave to her religion as he is to his smack. How they are both “just filling holes dug by modern life.” Something like that.

  He is in that room more than he is out of it, and when he is out of it I don’t mind the company. Truth is, lately anyway, I get lonely in my big but empty house. Lately the only conversation I have is with my daughters, four and five years old, and I’ve got a lot more to share with people than cookies and fairytales. I want someone to see what I’m doing in the garden. I want someone to talk books and movies with. Alex is never home and has time for nothing but work. He doesn’t care about having something constantly in bloom in the garden, or all of my new books, or what the kids and me did today. “Oh, that’s good, honey.” That’s all he ever says: “Oh, that’s good, honey.”He can’t even feign an interest. I mean, who says “oh” when they are interested? Nobody! They burst right into their response, so excited there’s no time for any “ohs.” But not Alex.

  “Hey, Alex, I took the kids to the mall today.”

  “Oh, that’s good, honey.”

  Is it too much to say, “Which mall? Did they have fun?What did you buy? Did you get any ice cream for them?” I could scream at Alex for every “oh” he utters. I might start. I will start. I will warn him. Three chances and then the screaming starts. The uttering of threats.

  Owen is good company. He has lived in St. John’s since I’ve known Alex, so Owen and I have only met a handful of times, and every time, we’ve been in a rush or a crowded room, like at the wedding. With him involved in the wedding, nothing could have gone wrong, I remember that much. I caught him checking with the kitchen staff on special food orders, and prepping the emcee for his speech. Before the reception I saw him double-checking that there were enough disposable cameras for every table and asking everyone if they had signed the guest book.

  Owen is the kind of guy you get to know instantly because he is open like the ocean and curious like a kid, and I swear no one has wanted to know every detail of my life like he does. I guess it’s because he’s a writer, maybe, so I am some character and he can’t know me until he gets my “backstory” and notices all my defining characteristics, like what I take in my coffee, and how I hold the cup, and if I am scared that the first sip is going to burn my tongue.

  Point being, I am enjoying the company, I’m showering in it.I’m making plans for the first time in far too long, feeling like a chicken freed from the coop and other such lame similes. I mean, Jesus, a trip to the beach, why was that once a silly thought? Now all it takes is a sunny day and Owen is loading the kids and me into my car and driving us to the beach, or the park, or even camping – we are going camping on the longweekend! There is something so charming about Owen, he is like watching fire burn. He taught the girls how to make marshmallow-roasting sticks without hurting themselves yesterday, and it was inexplicably captivating to hear him speak, and move, and laugh. Callie says Owen is her new best friend, and Lucia’s teacher has asked me who this Owen guy is she’s been talking so much about lately. I told Owen that and his smile nearly split his cheeks open!

  I think Owen is enjoying his stay with us too. The picket-fenced home, the kids. I think he wants the life his brother has in many ways. He’s great with the kids. It’ll be a shame if he never has his own family. A real and true shame. He asks Callie and Lucia what they want, and no matter how ridiculous the request, he’ll grant it, even if it means being wildly imaginative and building a tree house having no idea what he’s doing. He did it though, the tree house. Alex only ever talked about calling someone to come build the tree house. Owen though, the girls asked for it and three weeks later it was built, rubber-tire swing attached and all. He built it on one condition: they listen to their mother more. He fell off the unstable ladder twice, busted a thumbnail open with the hammer, and everything he touched for a full week made him flinch on account of the splinters, but he didn’t care. Like I said: father material. He even crawls up there with the kids at night and tells them moderately scary ghost stories before bed. The fresh air knocks the girls out; they’ve never fallen asleep so easily. I thank him for that every night, and every night he shrugs it off and reassures me he enjoys it as much as the girls do. He says it’s the fresh air that knocks the girls out, he says that’s how his mother wore him and Alex out.It’s odd, Alex never talks of their mother, but Owen never shuts up about her. Alex actually leaves the room when Owen shares a story of their mother. I like his stories. About his mother, about anything. He’s experiencing this world in a way so different from his brother.

  Alex has warned me not to pry about Owen’s past, to avoid the questions that require the past tense to answer. I see no dark past in Owen though, and I don’t understand how Owen could have a dark past and Alex not. They are brothers, but whatever, Alex exaggerates and has a God complex. Everyone is below him. He is a great man, my husband, but…nothing I haven’t written about before. Besides, I think people like Owen are simply too hard to understand, so we lump them in with all the other lost causes. People act a certain way for a reason, and it is the reasons we should judge, not the people. Sometimes a person’s life just gets off track, that simple. Owen is the sweetest man I have ever met. Period. He is refreshing. He is that guy who would run to the top of a burning building to save a little girl’s cat, hamster even. It makes the drinking sad, not dish
onourable. He opened up to me once. He said he wasn’t running from anything, and he wasn’t being a slob. He was just trying to feel alive, and the drinking, before it got out of hand, helped him feel more alive. I don’t know what he means by that, by “feeling more alive,” because I’ve never known a guy so in touch with life. So emotionally responsive to it.

  Ever since Alex bought this cabin he’s been saying how much Owen would love it up there. They must have been really close growing up, they speak so fondly of each other. It’s sad about their mother and father, but I think all that brought them closer together at least.

  We’re about halfway there. I figured I’d crack open this journal I started last winter out of boredom, because I hate these horrible audiobook CDs Alex buys to listen to when we drive out here. He says it’s an intellectual thing, “beats the radio,”but deep down I think he does it to avoid the awkward silence.Ten minutes into the drive and we run out of conversation, and that first ten minutes is usually just him talking about some patient of his. Then forty minutes of silence. Nothing pronounces the death of a marriage like silence. It’s not that Idon’t love him, and I know he loves me. But. But there is a thin line between familiarity and sterility, and a thinner line between neglect and the excuses he uses.