So Much Love Read online

  That sounds like my life, more every year. Something happens after you turn forty—things stop changing. The pathway through life, which seemed like it would lead over the horizon and unto death, fades away. Not because of a collision or a roadblock or anything so dramatic—we are simply where we are and perhaps we shall go no further. No fantastic career adventure or shocking physical improvement is in the stars for either of us now, though we are decently employed, decently attractive. And no child to watch climb the ladder of years and through her progress give us the illusion that we are moving forward ourselves. We simply are, together, and have so many decades left to evaluate this.

  The vulnerability of being in love is all that you stand to lose. When I think of that man, Catherine’s husband—I forget his name—I imagine his life as a perfect horror, hours and days of wondering. What can you do at dusk on a Saturday if all you’ve ever done is drink wine on your balcony with your wife? Because it does feel like that’s all I’ve ever done: I would no longer recognize the me I was before Gretta. Catherine’s husband must feel the same, only now he’s gone back to being that stranger. But perhaps they weren’t the same kind of couple as us—more talking, more laughter, less silence. Who can imagine another way to be married once you’ve been doing it a decade your own way? It’s like imagining another way to breathe. Catherine was so open, so chatty, though—it must have been a more conversational marriage.

  Still, whatever I imagined of other couples during the worst depths of our arguments or the chilly quiet periods, I know if Gretta were to die or leave me, it would ruin my life. A person can grow to resent that level of need for someone. Perhaps she feels the same about me. Or not. I have felt the weight and the threat of that vulnerability, these past few months, whenever we spoke of Catherine’s disappearance, each of us wondering how we would survive the absence and the ambiguity of such a loss. And even though we never discuss that fear, feeling it together creates a little intimacy—like laughing together in the dark of a movie theatre, staring straight ahead.

  Most weekends, we’re drained of conversation by Sunday afternoon, unable to find another reason to open our mouths without the stimuli of other people, other places. And yet, there’s still the desire to be in the same room—I’m not sure what it is we want, the physical closeness, or just the comforting face. And still the silence. So we sit at the dinner table this Sunday night over chicken penne and white wine, and my hand creeps toward the pile of mail. I shudder at the click of her fork against her teeth, then glance up, guiltily, to see she has produced a library copy of The Macabre Matter from nowhere and opened it near the beginning. She manipulates her fork in the pasta one-handed. Penne is good for that. There is a delicacy, and a kindness, to the way she raises her eyebrows over the edge of her book. She is waiting for me to approve, knowing I will.

  She passes me the parmesan cheese, noticing I’ve forgotten it without looking up. And despite a fat issue of The New Yorker that I can see peeking from the mail pile, I spend another minute thinking of the news and weather I’ll be able to report the next evening, at the next dinner (baked fish, I already know—Monday). After a day away, I can feel more like a provider. And what can I provide besides the hilarious things my students do, articles I’ve read, what I’m writing or might write. Hell, what I had for lunch if she wasn’t there to eat it with me. More and more, I want to tell her things.

  And yet, and yet. Though we never attained the closeness I thought we would—shimmering insights into what the other is thinking or feeling, perfect immersion in each other’s lives and relatives and hobbies, deep unwillingness to be apart for more than a day—none of the cozy cuddles depicted in commercials for insurance or hot chocolate—we exist in a kind of quiet harmony. The easy meals, the amenable relatives, the wide white bed. I do like to look across an expanse of sheets or pasta and see her, the way the lamplight hits her straight and narrow nose, the pursed pink of her lips. I couldn’t rescue her from a pinprick, from a rude gesture in traffic, and yet here we are, in the middle of our lives, together. Despite the lack of fantasy patina, I’m grateful for her, for us.

  —

  Heading home at the end of the day, I get that familiar homesickness just before I arrive. After a tough day—and now that I’m in my forties, I’m starting to feel like they’re mainly tough days—I still want to just spill it all out to Gretta and see if she can tell it back to me like a bedtime story. This desire has been growing all summer and fall, maybe since the beginning of spring when Catherine Reindeer first vanished, or since we each realized the other was devastated by the loss of this stranger. Or near-stranger. Maybe that was just one agony too many; we are kinder to each other now than we’ve been in years. We still don’t talk much, but her face when she’s genuinely listening to me is a comfort I could fall into. I don’t need advice, or any kind of commentary—after fifteen years, I know what she would say almost as well as what I would. This far into paying off the marital mortgage of intimacy, niceties like “How are you?” have become irrelevant—I know how she’s doing by the way she swallows her first mouthful of coffee in the morning, the rhythm of her stride on the stairs. In the evenings, we sit on opposite sides of the living room, the rasp of pages from our respective books the faintest of communications. It is a kind of love, and a kind of loss too. I remember when we would have at least told each other what the books were about.

  I know I am lucky that even when the dark falls so early in November, I have Gretta to come home to. Tonight, walking down the cooling streets of our tidy little neighbourhood, I just want to be sitting with her on the splintering wicker couch in the sunroom with the shrieks and chortles of primetime in the background for comfort, though I haven’t had the TV on since god knows when and I know that there are clothes to be mended draped over the screen. I’d love to watch a rerun with her now, even with all the plastic laughter and blow-dried hair. It would be the next best thing to having a conversation, if we could sit side by side on the couch, laughing at the same pratfalls at the same moments. It becomes easier to slide my hand into hers when she’s smiling, even if she’s not smiling at me. Just before I walk up the driveway, that’s what I’m hoping for.

  But still, when I’m at the foot of the stairs to our front door, I don’t go right in. I stop to fiddle with the package of midterm exams I’m carrying, the buckle of my briefcase, the cuff of my jacket. I don’t even fully know why I’m stalling. I guess I’m afraid that she’ll already be asleep or pretending to be, and we won’t talk at all. I’ll take out my keys in a moment.

  “They found her. Oh, Len, they’ve found her.”

  On the second-storey balcony of our townhouse is Gretta, with her hands clasped on the rail, and her hair draped around her face, leaning down to call to me. “Len, that girl, your student. Catherine Reindeer. She was just on the news. She’s alive. The police found her.” I haven’t heard Gretta speak so joyfully in a long time. The light of the bedroom flashes behind her head.

  I am on autopilot for a few moments and eventually wind up standing on our hallway hardwood in my dark, heavy shoes. Gretta pads down the hall from the bedroom and pauses halfway down the stairs, looking at me.

  “She was—they rescued her? Catherine’s okay?”

  She presents the story like a gift in a cupped hand—proud and eager. “No. No, she escaped. Some guy on his way home from work found her sitting beside Highway 13, just out beyond the new subdivision. I heard on the radio. She was all bloody… ”

  “And the other one, the kid that disappeared from the high school?”

  “No, I don’t—well, the news didn’t mention him.” Gretta’s chest bumps against the loose blue fabric of her blouse. “They never did connect those two cases, I don’t think.”

  For so many months, Catherine and Donny were a lucky penny that Gretta and I passed back and forth between us. Her despair at the loss of people she didn’t know revealed some of Gretta’s softness that I’d forgotten. Every time she brought them
up, her cheeks hollowed as her mouth turned down, and she looked the way I felt. A topic on which there was little to say other than So horrible, but somehow it was comforting to say it to each other.

  “But she’s alive? Catherine, she’s okay?” I ask.

  “I don’t really know. The news story was already half over when I tuned in. I never imagined she would still be alive after so long—girls who disappear usually die.” Gretta clasps her hand to her mouth, but her voice continues from underneath it. “Some things you can’t be rescued from.”

  I shake my head. “What did you actually hear?”

  She drops her hand. “There wasn’t much. The guy, the guy who found her, just saw her, and called the cops, and stayed with her.” Gretta is already moving past me, into the living room, switching on the television, knocking sweaters onto the floor.

  “—now twenty-eight, Reindeer was last seen leaving the restaurant where she worked last March… ”

  Catherine’s high-school graduation picture flashes on the screen. Over-the-shoulder smile and yellow-gold tassels. Then a more recent photo, a squished together double-selfie with her husband, their cheerful faces crowding the frame, leaving no hint of the background.

  “Police have not issued a statement regarding Reindeer’s abductor, nor whether her nearly eight-month ordeal is related to the disappearance of another Iria resident, seventeen-year-old Donny Zimmerman, who went missing on February 17 of this year. Questioning of Ms. Reindeer is expected to lead to further investigation. She was discovered near the Turgrove junction by the side of Highway 13—”

  I hate the use of the passive voice at the best of times—it’s weak in essays, sloppy in advertising. But it’s especially inappropriate to use to describe a young woman who once ran up three flights of stone stairs to return a pen she had borrowed, her thick ponytail bouncing, her breath not the least hastened by the sprint.

  On TV, they’re showing an old press conference—Catherine’s husband, bearded and wild-eyed, making a plea for any information that might lead to his beloved wife’s safe return. Those are the words he used. I’ve seen this clip so many times I feel like I’ve lived it; his sincerity, his shaking voice, his ugly cardigan. This is a married man, a man in love with his wife. I can feel the sob gathering in the back of my throat.

  “—multiple fractures, lacerations, in addition to severe malnutrition and, apparently—”

  “Gretta.”

  “—stabilized, though doctors are unsure—”

  “Gretta, let’s not watch this right now.”

  Her eyes are wide and wet. “Sure, they’re starting to repeat themselves, anyway. No new information.” But she doesn’t change the channel and her gaze doesn’t stray from my face.

  “—unavailable for comment at the time, though a press conference—”

  I reach out blindly for the remote and mash my thumb onto the buttons. On the next station, Louis C.K. is eating a doughnut.

  —

  After shutting off the ceiling light, I stand propped against the doorway and stare into the bedroom. All I can see of Gretta is her sharp profile, haloed by the green electricity of the alarm-clock display. I watch her nose tilt as she slowly looks toward me, though I know her eyes can’t have adjusted to the dark yet, that she can’t actually see me.

  “Len?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Coming to bed?” A creak of springs—the familiar sound of her rising onto her elbows.

  “Of course.” I walk to the edge of the bed—I know it’s three steps, I have memorized this whole house—sit down beside where I know her hip is. My eyes slowly adjust until her pale face emerges from the shadows for me. Her hand reaches up, brushes along my jawline. Invited in, like a vampire, I finally lie down.

  She asks quietly, “Aren’t you thrilled? These stories don’t usually have a happy ending.”

  I slide a hand down over her silky skin of her sternum and the rougher rayon of her nightdress. The fabric clings to her, not slinking up like I want it to when I stroke up over her ribs. I could count them, through the thin fabric and her thin skin. This is a summer nightgown; she should be wearing something warmer when the nights are this cold.

  “Or you wanted to rescue her yourself, is that it?”

  My first thought, the one I don’t say, is, “Of course I did.” What I actually say is, “It’s not the end, that’s what’s good.”

  She nods and reaches for the drawstring at my waist, then stops. “Did you hear that?” Her body is tense, drawing away from me, pressing into the mattress.

  “Just the wind knocking something.” I’ve managed to slip a hand under her nightgown. Though I can’t make out the colour in the dark, I know that the red has faded to peach from too much line-drying in the sun. My palm glides over the cords of muscle in her thigh. “You’re fine. Everything’s fine.”

  Her wet eyes shift and skitter, searching the room behind me. “No wind tonight.” I try to kiss her but she twists away. “Maybe it was nothing.” She’s shaking, tears sliding back on her temples, into her ears. She brushes the tears away with her wrist, impatient. I don’t know what she’s thinking.

  “You don’t—You don’t usually hear things, Gretta.” She doesn’t usually weep either. I wonder if it’s for Catherine, or for whatever has gone so quietly wrong between us. I try to scoop her shoulders up so I can draw off the nightdress, but it takes me a few tries before she understands what I want.

  “That poor girl. And the boy—still no one knows what happened to him, or anyway they didn’t say… ”

  I can watch her eyes watch me and still not be sure exactly what she can see. “I know. It’s all right. I’ve got you.”

  —

  Afterwards, Gretta murmurs against my stomach. “She’ll be okay. Maybe she’ll forget a little bit; she’s just a kid.”

  I don’t remind her that Catherine’s in her late twenties, or that she has a husband, a house, a future that was more or less already laid out when the worst thing happened. Who knows if she can get that future back? But I don’t want to start complicating the conversation now. Gretta, her mouth open against my skin, is falling asleep in my arms like she hasn’t in months. It is a relief to hug her to me, to feel the curve of my palm fit perfectly below the curve of her shoulder blade.

  I should let this story end the way she wants it to.

  At the End of Breath

  The shock of the moment welds Grey’s feet to the floor, but he can still raise his hand to make his Jean-Paul Belmondo gesture, running his right thumb around the bow of his upper lip and the dip of his lower one. Doing this in front of the cop who brought him to the hospital, Grey feels self-conscious in a way he hasn’t in years. Maybe not since he started imitating the gesture with an adolescent fervour the first time he saw the movie Breathless, somewhere back in high school. Watching that cheerful thief watch the confusion of Paris and brush his lips in consternation, Grey saw something he could use, something to do when he didn’t know what to do. In front of his parents’ medicine-cabinet mirror, he trained himself, learning to use the gesture in moments of stress and distress and deep thought. By eighteen, he had finally internalized the motion to the point that he, like that small-time criminal, was scarcely aware of the touch at his mouth, save for the tiny measure of comfort it brought. In the twenty years since, he has traced his mouth in concern and terror and anticipation and barely been conscious of it, but now, in this small, white room, he wishes his hands hung at his sides. Still he can’t stop. Webbed with thin blue blankets and IV lines, black thread stitching across the left edge of her jaw, Catherine is breathing.

  His left hand is on the doorknob, and even though he’s pushed the door to Catherine’s room all the way open now, he can’t quite let go yet. The metal is smooth and cool in his grip but warming, growing moist with sweat. He watches her breathe. He can’t tell if she’s unconscious or if her eyes are swollen shut. The yellow-purple flesh around them doesn’t twitch at the echoing clic
k when he finally releases the doorknob, drops his hand from his lips, and slides one foot across linoleum and into the room. One step and then another and then she’s real.

  This moment—Grey standing at the foot of this strange bed—is the best-case scenario. This is what he has prayed for with such repetition and passion that the prayer too has passed into unconscious habit. For the eight months she’s been gone, every streetlamp he saw, barking dog he heard, moment of stillness he experienced, has been accompanied by that please please please please please that doesn’t require will or thought. It just comes; he gives his mind the freedom. And yet, in all that time he has never let himself look too closely at the possibility that Catherine might not be alive anymore. He’s never allowed himself the thought of that other Catherine, past-tense Catherine, subterranean and still.

  He has pictured this room before. Everything that has happened and is about to happen has already been imagined a thousand times in the darkness of his silent bedroom: the respectful tap on the front door at dinnertime, the cop’s heavy face in the window, the gulp of terror at the possibility of the worst news tinged with the lottery-scratchcard hope of what if? The semi-hysterical questions he asked in the police car, the many bobbing journalists with their cameras and questions on the plaza in front of the hospital—it was all distressingly like a TV crime drama. The excited, beaming deference of the hospital staff and the bleached whiteness of the hallway, the nurses’ station, the door to her room. The narrow barred bed. Except, in his fantasies, the hospital room had a window.

  There have been things he didn’t imagine—couldn’t, or wouldn’t. If she wasn’t dead and wasn’t with him, then she was somewhere else, but he never pictured where or how, any more than he pictured the insides of his eyelids. And he never pictured how she would look in the hospital bed—partly shaved hair, broken dirty fingernails, her tall form so rigidly pinned on her back underneath the white sheets. Catherine could never sleep on her back. He had needed to save his strength for whatever reality would sooner or later deal him; he had no reserves for potential tragedies. Even in the worst of fear—the nightmares where she was bleeding, sobbing, being dragged away by the hair, or the times he watched her mother weep into a cup of tea—it always seemed possible that he could get to this moment. And here it is. This is his new reality, unambiguous, unimagined, sharp as a knife blade: his wife on this white, white bed. His vivid, fidgety wife, who bounced through drugstores and libraries, now a stone sculpture of herself—except for her breathing belly rising small under the sheet. His stomach churns with both relief and revulsion at having her back but not back, alive but broken.