Dead Line

Chapter Eleven

We pulled up to the airport, Elizabeth sitting stone-faced in the passenger seat, Baker sprawled in the back with his chin resting on the seat between his front paws. He was, the dog that he is, taking his cue from us in regards to his mood, and the cue was — very decidedly — to be forlorn.

The ride from the waterfront to Logan, in terms of total miles, encompassed about three of them. So why then, one might logically wonder, did I feel like a member of the Donner Party who had just eaten one of their relatives on their endless journey across the snow-covered cliffs of the Continental Divide?

Along the way, we tried to keep the sparse conversation on completely safe terrain — when would the movers arrive in San Francisco with her stuff, when would she report to work, what might her first story be, where was the art museum story headed. But during one of the many lulls, I said to her, sincerely but incorrectly, “I love you.” I paused and added, “You know that, right?”

The polite answer, the easy one anyway, would have been for Elizabeth to say, “Of course I do, Jack. And I love you too.” But Elizabeth, being every inch a woman, and a wonderfully strong one at that, instead replied, “Sometimes I do. But mostly I don’t — not anymore.” She said this while blankly staring out the front window as the narrow environs of the Callahan Tunnel slapped past.

I remained quiet for a moment, partly in contemplation, partly to make sure this farewell didn’t ignite into unnecessary trench-to-trench combat.

She stepped into that cold and barren expanse and said, “But I understand.”

To the uninitiated, this might be cause for celebration, a woman, a good woman, essentially saying that it’s okay to act the way I have, to be the person I’ve been, because she in some way understands the forces behind it, the very cause. But by now, I knew that would be a gravely naïve, even stupid read, an invitation to a much more strident fight.

I said, “Then I should tell you more often.” Notice the effective use of the present tense, keeping everything forward-looking and harmonious and all that other good stuff.

“You should love me more.” She said this without a moment’s hesitation, her words coming out flat and plain like distant rifle fire.

We were heading out of the tunnel now into the dusk of a September night. The lighted billboards along the side of the ramshackle highway pictured exotic places like Paris and a sugar-sand Caribbean beach, including one with a slogan, Closer Than You Think…. Yeah, maybe, but not even the recently retired Concorde could have effectively whisked me away from the helpless moroseness of this farewell scene.

I stayed quiet again as I pulled into the airport. My eyes absently followed a jet silently ascending above the terminal buildings and floating toward destinations unknown, all those lucky passengers rising to the clouds, leaving so much of this behind, looking down at this world in all of its relative inconsequence.

She said to me, for the second time now, “But I understand.”

I knew where she was going. I knew where she was going because we had both been there before, and I’ll readily admit, I’d rather be on my way to Paris or the Caribbean.

“You tried, Jack, you did, and I appreciate that. I love you, and you know that. There was a time, a long time, when I wanted to marry you and make babies with you and grow old and spoil grandkids and travel the world, and to always come home to a place, a big old drafty house, that we liked more than anyplace else. And we’d like it because we were in it together, always.”

I’d never actually been kicked in the stomach by a shod horse, but I imagine this is how it might feel. I lost my breath for the briefest of moments as my mind raced toward a scene involving an eternally shapely, fashionably dressed and graying Elizabeth Riggs picking up a grandchild in the kitchen of our suburban home and resting her on the counter while she cooked the type of dinner that she never even considered in her first forty years on Earth.

She said, “You tried, Jack, but you can’t do it, at least not with me. You lost more than your wife and your baby in that delivery room a few years ago. You lost a part of your soul. It makes me love you even more, but it also makes me crazy that there isn’t a damned thing I can do to help. I always thought I’d be able to, but now I’ve come to terms with the fact that I never will.”

It’s funny what happens in these fights. The optimistic part of me, which I’d like to think is the biggest part of me, thought that by opening the door to a confrontation, what I’d find on the other side was something so simple as a back and forth over why we had been noncommunicative over the past few weeks. We’d talk about it, we’d both apologize, we’d make plans for me to fly out there in early October for a quiet weekend of relationship rebuilding by the Bay. Big kiss, have a good flight. Maybe we didn’t get at the core of the issue, but the core of anything is often too hot a place to be.

And then this. The door flings open and what you find is a veritable cauldron of unfathomable female emotion — stunningly practical at one level, devastatingly complicated at another, all told with Elizabeth’s admirable economy of words. She might be tough, but she was never melodramatic.

We were pulling into the garage by now. This was not an occasion when I could zip right up to the terminal, yank her luggage from the trunk, and tearfully kiss her good-bye, all as a pesky state cop hollers something about me idling in a no-parking zone. So I found a space and said, “I don’t agree with that.”

That’s what I said; the reality, I’m not so sure. Elizabeth had a knack for being right in these things, and tended to be a scholar of all things Jack. I had a tendency to block so much of the emotion out, mostly because if I didn’t, I feared it would swallow me whole.

It was four years before that Katherine and I rushed through the doors of Georgetown Hospital on the day that we were to have our first baby, which was going to be one of the truly great days in our already blessed lives. Six hours later, I staggered from that hospital completely, unequivocally, incomprehensibly alone, in many ways forever changed, in other crucial ways always stuck in the awful moments of that single day. Katherine died that afternoon, of what the exhausted doctor explained to me was a placental tear. The baby, our daughter, died as well, literally drowning on the blood that had nourished her for all those pregnant months.

When I got back to our empty town house that afternoon, if I had owned a gun I probably would have loaded it. If I had a garage, I would have pulled the doors shut and sat in my car. I’m not saying I would have killed myself. In fact, I can reasonably say that sound judgment would have prevailed. But never in my life had I ever felt such utter, inconsolable loneliness, not just for what had just happened, but for the ache of what did not.

Instead, I sat on the couch, Baker mournfully, nervously at my feet, and cried like I never have before and hope never to again. I cried until I couldn’t see. I cried until I couldn’t think, until I didn’t have any tears left to shed. On my way to bed, our bed, I pulled the door shut on the nursery that we never got to use. I opened the pocket doors of Katherine’s closet, and her familiar smells, calm smells, beautiful smells, gently wafted out. I ran my hand down the back of my favorite black dress of hers, the one she wore to our favorite restaurant, La Chaumière, the night she gave me the news. We had ordered dessert and were waiting for it. I leaned over the table and told her in no uncertain terms what I was planning to do with her once we got home.

She said to me, “Jack, I owe you an apology for being something of a bitch lately, but it’s all your fault.”

Truth is, she had been something of a bitch lately, somewhat short, tired, put upon. I said with sincere curiosity, “What the hell did I do?”

“You got me pregnant.”

She said this as the biggest, happiest smile filled her entire stunning face. She was still smiling when tears dripped simultaneously out of the corners of both of her eyes. She just kept looking at me, letting the drops roll slowly toward her exquisite mouth, with this expression that spoke to our greatest dreams. It’s a look that I never want to forget, and never will.

I slowly shut the closet door and Baker pulled himself up off the floor and warily followed me over to Katherine’s dresser, where he settled back down onto the carpet with a long, loud groan. There, I opened her top drawer and found an envelope resting on her wool socks and delicate nylons, and on that envelope was just her name scrawled in handwriting that was jarringly familiar: mine.

I opened it up and, with trembling fingers, unfolded a note that I had written a month before. “Katherine,” I said to her, and thought it unusual that I didn’t use the word “dear.” “Our entire lives are about to change in the next few weeks, always for the better. But there’s one thing I never want you to forget, one thing that I’ve felt in every cell of my being since the day we met. You were put on this Earth to be with me, and I was put on this Earth to be with you, and that will never change, even as our life together does. I love you more today than yesterday, and I’ll love you more tomorrow than today. Jack.”

I staggered over to the bed, our bed, before the storm of emotion overwhelmed me yet again. I burrowed my head into her pillow, smelling her wonderful smells. I somehow fell asleep to a dream that Katherine was in the kitchen when I walked downstairs, making waffles. I said to her, “In your whole life, you’ve never made breakfast like this,” and she gave me a pouty little look of faux regret and said, “I know.”

So getting back to Elizabeth’s point about what else I lost in the delivery room that day. Yes, I probably did lose part of my soul along with everything else. But if broken bones can eventually heal on their own, if cuts can scab over and return to real skin, if bruises can give way to pink flesh, shouldn’t a soul be able to regenerate? Shouldn’t time heal even the deepest wounds?

I thought it did, or it would, or it had. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t spend my life reliving the look of pain and panic on Katherine’s face as the doctor brusquely ordered me from the room, or the unnatural coolness of my wife’s forehead when that same doctor pulled the sheet away and I tearfully bent down and kissed a face that I had kissed a thousand times before, but this time for the final time. I thought of it enough, but couldn’t, wouldn’t, let it engulf me. At least I didn’t think I had.

Rather than elaborate on my disagreement, I got out of the car and walked back toward the trunk. Elizabeth got out as well, but she then opened the rear door and slid onto the backseat, beside Baker. I saw through the rear window Baker run his enormous, grainy tongue directly across her face. Most women would have screamed about their makeup or the germs of the general grotesqueness of it all. Not Elizabeth. She cupped Baker’s big furry head in both of her hands and planted a massive kiss on the bridge of his proud nose, and then held her head against his. When she got out and shut the door, she was running her palm across her face, but it wasn’t Baker’s slime she was wiping off, but fresh tears.

In that one moment, it occurred to me that the entire world, my entire world, was simply a constant succession of good-byes.

“I’ll miss that dog like I don’t even want to imagine,” she said, softly, more to herself than anything. Then, to me, she said, “Remember, I made him an appointment at the vet for Friday to get some of those fatty tumors looked at. I left you a reminder on the refrigerator door.”

We were walking through the garage, toward the American Airlines terminal, when she said to me with her tone stiff and her eyes still straight ahead, “So what is it that you disagree with?”

Good question. She ought to think about becoming a reporter. By the time I answered, we were out of the garage, traversing one of those wide crosswalks with the angled stripes. A couple of rental-car shuttle buses had stopped to let us pass. I was carrying one of her bags on my shoulder and another in my hand. She had a knapsack and a shoulder bag. All of which is to say, it was an awkward situation, physically if not emotionally.

“This is a long conversation,” I said. “You really think walking through the airport as you’re getting ready to leave is the right time to have it?”

“I think it’s the only time we have left,” she replied. The only time we have left. Those words fell out of her like heavy stones and sat there between us in all their cold, deliberate hardness.

That line, admittedly, caught me short. We were in the terminal now, waiting in line for her to check her bags, people in front of us, people in back — no time to dissect the emotional shortcomings of Jack Flynn. She, though, didn’t seem to mind.

We stood close and she stared down at the floor and she said in her low, husky voice, “I love you, Jack. I know you love me. But it’s not enough. Not anymore.”

I looked over at a balding, middle-aged guy, a million-miler, according to the tag on his carry-on, and he was looking back at me, either thinking I’m a lucky bastard for being with this knockout woman, or a poor slob because of my inability to make it work.

I looked back down at the floor. A moment later we were beckoned to the counter by a terse woman in a uniform who cared not a whit that both of our lives were about to irretrievably change. She ticketed Elizabeth with barely a smile or a word, and we walked over to the security screening area and stood silently in the middle of the hallway. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts cart behind us, a bank of Fleet 24-hour tellers beside us, and aggravated travelers jostling past us for places that were better than here.

Elizabeth looked sadder than I had ever seen her, but oddly resolute. She said to me, “Jack, I mean it that I don’t blame you. I don’t know what I’d be like if what happened to you ever happened to me. But I’ve tried to help you, and I don’t think I can anymore. I need something that I don’t think is yours to give.”

She leaned in and kissed me in that warm, familiar way of hers, her hand on my shoulder and then on the back of my neck. We locked gazes for a moment, and then she turned and walked away with a barely audible, “Bye.” I suppose I could have called out to her, run after her, somehow blocked her way. But for reasons that I may never fully understand, I didn’t.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I just didn’t have it in me.