Five Days

Thursday

SUNRISE. I USED to get up after it. Now I wake well before the dawn. A readjustment of my body clock that also arrived with my ability to again sleep through the night. Sunrise. I usually have had the second cup of coffee by the time those initial tentative shafts of light have found their way into my kitchen. On fine clear mornings — and there have been a string of them this week — the early-morning light, especially at this time of year, can be like copper filament; a luminous braiding that always seems to target the little counter where I sip the Italian roast that I make in a cafetiиre, and which I now get specially ground for me.

The interplay of the light, the heavy aromatics of the coffee, the fact that I have just woken up from a reasonable night’s sleep without (for the past six weeks) the aid of medication. Significant small details to celebrate at the beginning of another day of life.

I have become a runner. Every morning, after a sunup breakfast, I put on a very lightweight pair of track shoes that Ben convinced me to buy (he too has gotten the running bug) and go out for a five-mile jog to the water. My route rarely changes. Houses, avenues, road, more houses (the initial stretch of neighborhood modest, the next expansive and expensive), a bridge, trees, open spaces, rolling green lawns, then that telltale white marine light announcing that I am close to the water’s edge.

Running suits me. Solitary, singular, very much bound up in a daily negotiation with how far you’re willing to push yourself; the frontiers of your endurance. At first, when I decided that, yes, I would force myself out for a daily run, I was a mess. I could not get myself further than a half-a-mile, and I would frequently find myself winded, or suffering the sort of physical agonies that beset neophytes to the jogging world. Then Ben — who’d become so smitten with the sport that he ended up on the university’s cross-country team — told me I should come spend a Saturday with him at Farmington, during which he’d take his mother out and teach her a few tricks of the running trade. Actually my son bettered that promise, as he convinced his coach — a very nice young guy named Clancy Brown (very thoughtful and cool in his non rah-rah way, and clearly pleased to have a talented young painter as one of his star runners) — to spend an hour looking over my form. He helped me rid myself of all sorts of bad habits I had already picked up.

Since then, Ben and I run together whenever we see each other (which is about once a month — not bad considering that, when I was in college, I only went home at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter). My form has considerably improved. Five miles is now the quotidian target — but, as Clancy recommended, I do take one day off a week. I also pace myself with care, as I don’t want to court serious injury or the sort of burnout I read about all the time in the running magazines to which I now subscribe. Now I can do the five-mile jog in around an hour — and I’m pleased with that. Like Ben, it is the ability to lose myself in the tangible physicality of running — coupled with the rising endorphins which brighten life’s darker contours — that has made me such a convert.

And this morning — given the meeting I must attend in a few hours’ time — an endorphin rush will be most welcome. The fact that the daybreak sunlight is so radiant certainly helps. So too does the fact that, at six-twelve a.m., which is when I started my run this morning (I now always regard the digital readout on the watch on my wrist before starting), the city of Portland is only just waking up. As such I can make it to and from my apartment on Park Street to the lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth before the bridge traffic begins to build up.

My apartment: a two-bedroom place in a reasonably well-preserved Federalist building on what I think is the city’s nicest street. When I came to look at it around some months ago, my first thought was that the houses here are very like the sort you find on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Immediately I found myself having one of those moments of encroaching melancholy that became so predominant after that weekend, and which I finally took steps to curb (the jogging being one of the ways out of the darkness into which I fell for a time). But I still adored the street — and the apartment was, at $1,150 per month, not exactly a bargain. Just under one thousand square feet. A little homey, a little old-fashioned, a little bit scuffed up. But the owner told me (via the realtor) that he knew it needed a paint job and sanded floors and revarnished kitchen cabinets and a bunch of other home improvement details. So he was willing to knock off two-fifty per month from the rent for the first two years if I would undertake it. Again it was Ben who stepped in. We set a parts and labor budget of around $4,000 — absolutely all I could afford. In August he and two college friends literally moved in with air mattresses and sleeping bags. They did all the work in three weeks, pocketing $1,000 each. They left me a very clean and airy place of white walls and varnished floorboards. I then worked twenty hours a week overtime for the next two months — and through judicious shopping at several of the quirky secondhand stores around town, I managed to furnish it in a style that is largely rooted in mid-fifties Americana, and which Lucy deemed ‘retro cool’ when she first saw the apartment put together. Frankly that’s a little generous on her part. It still feels very much as if it is a work in progress, just one step above basic. But there’s a room for Ben or Sally when they come visit. And Ben surprised me with a gift of an original painting of his: a blurred series of blue geometric shapes, on a grayish-white background; very Maine marine light in its sensibility, very much using that Tetron Azure Blue I scored for him. I had to hold back my tears when my son showed up with the painting, telling me: ‘Let this be your water view.’

He’s right: the apartment itself doesn’t have much of a view (it faces the rear alleyway behind my building and is on the ground floor). But outside of the occasional weekend revelers who stagger down the rear passageway late Saturday night, it is fantastically quiet. And it does get the most sensational early-dawn light. And it’s been such an important bolthole for me.

Coffee and muesli finished, I washed up the dishes (I still don’t have a dishwasher), then reached for my nylon running jacket on the back of the stool at the little kitchen counter-bar where I eat most of my meals. I am very conscious of the time this morning, as the meeting in question begins at eight-thirty, and is a ten-minute drive from here. I’ll need to shower and wash my hair and put on the one suit I own beforehand — which means a good hour when I get back from my run. Which means I must leave now.

October again. The first Thursday in October. A year ago to the day, it was the eve of my leaving for Boston. And now.

Now I run.

Grabbing my keys I zipped up my jacket, locked my door behind me and hit the street. A perfect day. The sun gaining altitude, that bracing autumn chill underscoring the morning, the city still hushed, the elms and pines on my street truly golden. I turned right. Two jogging minutes later I was down by the port. Another right-hand turn, a hard uphill climb on the pedestrian pavement that accompanies the car ramp up to the bridge, then a spectacular run at suspended altitude across Casco Bay. Then a stretch of shopping centers. Then an extended neighborhood of middle-class modestness until I reached that stretch of grand homes fronting the water. The homes of the city’s top lawyers and accountants and the few captains of industry that we have in the state. Homes that speak of discreet wealth. No ostentation. Just understated ocean-view reserve. Beyond this small enclave of serious money (and there are so few of those in Maine), there is a public park built around Portland’s venerable lighthouse. It’s a ravishing public green space; a hint of savage sea just a short distance from the city center. My run takes me right down to the water’s edge, then up a path to the lighthouse: a white beacon standing in crisp silhouette against the angry majesty of the encroaching Atlantic. I read somewhere that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — when resident in Portland — used to walk here every day. In my darker moments some months ago — when I had just moved into the apartment, when the gloom that had encircled me for so long like a particularly bad weather system was still refusing to blow off into the next county — I couldn’t help but wonder if Longfellow had plotted out his most famous poem, Evangeline, while following the same lighthouse route along which I jog almost every morning. And given that Evangeline is a sort of American Orpheus and Eurydice tale of separated lovers searching for each other amidst the continental vastness of this once-new world. well, life has its attendant ironies. Even when jogging.

This morning there were just two other runners out by the lighthouse, including a man of around seventy whom I seem to inevitably pass every morning. He’s highly fit, his face as taut as piano wire, always dressed in the same gray sweat pants and a Harvard sweatshirt. As he jogged by me today he gave me his usual brief wave of the hand (which I always reciprocate with a smile). I have no idea who this man is. Nor have I made any attempt to find out, as he, in turn, has never chosen to discover my name and particulars. I sense that, like me, he prefers to keep it that way. Just as I also appreciate the fact that, for a few seconds every morning, I have this silent greeting with this individual about whom I know absolutely nothing. As he knows nothing about me. We are passing objects with no knowledge of each other’s story; of the accumulated complexities of our respective lives; of whether we are with someone or alone; of the way we will individually negotiate the trajectory of the day ahead; of whether we think life is treating us well or harshly at this given moment in recorded time.

Or, in my case, the fact that, ninety minutes from now, I will be in a lawyer’s office, signing the legal agreement that will trigger the end of my marriage.

The legal agreement that will trigger the end of my marriage.

Yes, it’s legal — in that two lawyers have negotiated it, and once it is signed by both parties it will be legally binding. And the split of the shared assets we have has not been contentious. But the word ‘agreement’ hints at a reasonable parting of the ways. Sadly this has been anything but an amicable parting — as Dan, all these months later, still cannot get his head around the fact that I ended the marriage; that I left him because I was unhappy and felt our relationship was terminal, dead; that, as he put it during one of the many moments when he pleaded for a second chance, ‘If you were actually leaving me for someone else at least I could understand. But to leave me because you just want to leave me. ’

He never found out about how I was going to leave him for someone else, or how broken I was in the wake of all that suddenly not happening. The very fact that he never registered the emotional slide I had slipped into thereafter. well, that was our marriage. And one which I continued to accept in the initial months afterwards, largely because I was still carrying so much injurious sadness. Going through the motions of life, but coping with the most aching sort of loss.

My children, on the other hand, quickly registered the distress I was in. On the morning that I arrived back home before dawn to see Dan off to his new job — and found myself in tears at the realization, I should not be back here with this man — I was found three hours later by Sally, passed out in the porch chair in which I had parked myself; sleep overtaking me as I gazed upwards into the limitlessness of space.

‘Mom, Mom?’

Sally nudged me back into consciousness. I woke, feeling stiff and unwell. When she asked me what I was doing out in the cold, all I could do was bury my head in my daughter’s shoulder and tell her I loved her. Usually Sally would have reacted with adolescent horror at such a show of parental emotion — especially as I had to fight to maintain my composure when hugging her. But instead of displaying sixteen-year-old disdain, she put her arms around me and said:

‘You OK?’

‘Trying to be.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

‘Then why are you out here in the cold?’

‘That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years.’

Sally pulled back and looked at me long and hard, and finally asked:

‘Are you going to leave him?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘And I’m not stupid. Are you going to leave him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t stay for me.’

Hugging me again tightly she then left for school.

An hour or so later I had to head back south to Portland and get Ben’s paints into the hands of his professor. Heading south meant passing through the town of Bath. I still had Richard’s business card, and had earlier unpacked his leather jacket from my suitcase and put it in the trunk of my car. I also still had his glasses in my shoulder bag. No, I wasn’t going to do anything dramatic like drop them both off personally at his office. Though I also toyed with the idea of putting them both in a box and mailing it to him with a simple one-line note, ‘I wish you well’, I instinctually knew that the best thing to do now was to do nothing. So I got to Portland and dropped the paints in with the receptionist at the Museum of Art, who assured me that she’d get them to Professor Lathrop. En route back to the car I texted Ben, telling him the Tetron Azure Blue had been delivered to the museum and should be with him tonight. Then I passed one of the many homeless men who always seem to line Congress Street in Portland and always ask for a handout so they can eat that day. The guy I saw just a few steps from the museum looked around fifty. Though he was unshaven and clearly downcast I could see from the soft way he asked if I could help him out that he was someone whom life had banged up badly. The morning had turned cold and gray. He was just wearing a light nylon jacket that wasn’t providing much in the way of insulation. Walking on to my car, I retrieved the leather jacket from my trunk, then returned to where the man was crouching by a lamppost and handed it to him.

‘This might keep you warmer,’ I said.

He looked at me, bemused.

‘You’re giving me this?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘But why?’

‘Because you need it.’

He took the jacket, and immediately tried it on.

‘Hey, it fits,’ he said, even though it actually swam a bit on his lanky frame.

‘Good luck,’ I said.

‘Any chance I could hit you for a couple of bucks as well?’

I reached into my bag and handed him a $10 bill.

‘You’re my angel of mercy,’ he said.

‘That’s quite the compliment.’

‘And you deserve it. Hope you get happier, ma’am.’

That comment gave me pause for thought all the way back home. Was I that transparent? Did I look that crushed? Though the man’s observation got me anxious, it made me force myself to present a cheerful face to my hospital colleagues when I returned to work the next morning. By the end of the week Dr Harrild also discreetly asked if there was ‘something wrong’.

‘Have I done anything wrong?’ I asked.

‘Hardly, hardly,’ he said, slightly taken aback by my tone. ‘But you’ve seemed a bit preoccupied recently. And I’m just a little concerned.’

So was I, as I hadn’t slept more than three hours a night since returning from Boston, and was beginning to feel the instability that accompanies several nights of insomnia. But I also understood the message behind Dr Harrild’s voice of concern: Whatever is going on in your life that is so clearly vexing you, you can’t start letting it affect your work.

I called my primary physician that evening — a local woman named Dr Jane Bancroft who is very much an old-school local doctor: straight talking, no nonsense. When I phoned her office and told her receptionist it was a matter of some urgency — and could she ring my cellphone, and not the land line — I got a message back five minutes later, saying the doctor could see me the next morning if that would work.

I changed plans and decided to drive over to Farmington and spend the day with Ben there. Texting my son and saying I would now arrive around one p.m., I made it to Dr Bancroft’s office, as arranged, at nine a.m. — after another night where sleep only overtook me around five. Dr Bancroft — a woman of about sixty, petite, wiry, formidable — took one look at me and asked:

‘So how long have you been depressed?’

I explained how the sleeplessness had arrived in my life only a few days ago.

‘Smart of you to get in here fast then. But the insomnia is usually a sign of larger long-term difficulties. So I’ll ask you again — how long have you been depressed?’

‘Around five years,’ I heard myself saying, then added: ‘But it hasn’t affected my work or anything else until now.’

‘And why do you think the sleeplessness has arisen this week?’

‘Because. something happened. Something which seems to have crystallized a sense that. ’

I broke off, the words swimming before me but unable to find their way into my mouth. God, how I needed to sleep.

‘Depression can be there for years,’ Dr Bancroft said, ‘and we can function with it for quite a long time. It becomes a bit like a dark shadow over us that we choose to simply live with, to see as part of us. Until the gloom begins to submerge us and it becomes unbearable.’

I left Dr Bancroft’s office with a prescription for a sleeping pill that was also a ‘mild’ anti-depressant called Mirtazapine. One per day before bedtime, and she assured me it wouldn’t leave me feeling groggy. She also gave me the name of a therapist in Brunswick named Lisa Schneider whom Dr Bancroft considered ‘sound’ (and that was high praise from her), and whose services would be covered by my health plan. I got the prescription filled at my local pharmacy. I drove the two hours to Farmington. I was relieved to see Ben looking far better than I had seen him in months. I viewed the work in progress. It was astonishing in its scale — a huge nine-foot-by-six-foot canvas — and in its ambition. Seen from afar it was boldly abstract: wave-like shapes, contrasting blue and white tonalities, with an energy and a ferocity to the brush strokes that called to mind the anger of the coastal waters which so defined Ben’s childhood and also (I sensed) a reflection of so much of the turmoil that had characterized the last year of his life. Maybe it was my lack of sleep, my own personal turmoil, and seeing how Ben had articulated his own recent anguish into this clearly remarkable work (all right, I am his mother — but even given my natural maternal bias, this was such an impressive and daring painting), but I found myself fogging up again.

‘You OK, Mom?’ Ben asked.

‘I’m just so impressed, overwhelmed.’

The tears now began to flow — despite my ferocious efforts to curb them and the sobs that suddenly accompanied them. To his immense credit, my son did not blanch in the face of such raw emotion. On the contrary, he put his arms around me and said nothing. I subsided quickly, apologizing profusely, telling him I hadn’t slept well the past night or so, and I was just so incredibly proud of what he had achieved, how he had bounced back from such a difficult moment in his life.

Ben just nodded and said that I was the best mother imaginable. This set me off crying again, and I excused myself and found the bathroom off his studio. Gripping the sink I told myself that all would be better after a night’s sleep.

Once I pulled myself together Ben and I went out to eat at a diner.

‘We could have done something a little more fancy,’ I told him as we slipped into a booth.

‘Why drop money on restaurant food? Anyway, this is my hangout — and even though it’s cheap I’ve yet to get food poisoning.’

A waitress came by. We ordered. As soon as she was out of sight Ben looked up at me and said:

‘Sally called me the other day.’

‘Really?’ I said.

‘You sound surprised.’

‘Well, I just didn’t think you guys were in much contact.’

‘We speak at least twice a week.’

And why hadn’t I figured this out? Or noticed their closeness?

‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘And you sound a little amazed because you thought my cheerleader sister and her arty-farty brother could never be close.’

‘I stand corrected.’

‘She’s a little worried about you, Mom. As am I. And she told me about the other night when you got back from Boston and she found you asleep on the porch. It’s a little late in the year for that, isn’t it?’

‘I was having a bad night, that’s all.’

‘But you told me earlier that it was the only last night or so when you hadn’t been able to sleep. Sunday was six nights ago — and judging from the rings under your eyes. ’

‘All right, I’ve been having a bad week.’

‘Why?’

‘Stuff.’

‘Stuff with Dad?’

I nodded.

‘Sally told me that too. Do you want to talk about it?’

Instinctively I shook my head. Then:

‘I do. but I also don’t think that’s fair to you. Because it means you’re hearing my side, not his side.’

‘Not that Dad would ever dream of telling me his side of anything.’

‘I know you have your problems with him.’

‘Problems? That’s polite. No communication whatsoever is more like it. The guy and I just don’t connect. Haven’t for years. I get the feeling he doesn’t really like me.’

‘He loves you very much. It’s just that he’s become so lost over the past few years. That’s not making any excuses for him. I think he’s genuinely, clinically depressed. Not that he would ever acknowledge that, or seek help.’

‘And what are you?’

‘Functionally depressed.’

‘That’s news to me.’

‘And to me too. But this sleeplessness I’ve been having recently. my doctor feels that it’s as if the depression, which I’ve kept so submerged for years, has finally found some sort of physiological outlet to let me know I am really not in a good place.’

‘So you are getting help for it?’

I nodded.

‘That’s good,’ Ben said, putting his hand on my arm and squeezing it, a gesture so sweet, so benevolent, so grown-up that I found myself choking back tears again.

‘Sally also hinted that there was something which triggered all this.’

‘I see,’ I said, thinking: My children really do discuss their parents when they are out of our field of vision.

‘Did something happen?’ Ben asked.

I met my son’s gaze and said:

‘A disappointment.’

Ben held my gaze — and in his eyes I could see him registering this, considering its deliberate vagueness, its multiple possible meanings, its implications. and eventually deciding not to push the matter further.

‘Sally told me you’ve been very much elsewhere all week — that she was cutting you a wide berth you seemed so withdrawn.’

‘No sleep does that. But I have some pills to help me now. And I am determined to do what you did — get myself out of the dark wood.’

Some hours later, in the little motel room I had taken for the night (there was no way I was dealing with darkened Maine back roads on no sleep), I found myself crying again as I replayed my conversation with my wonderful son. I also made a mental note to call Sally first thing in the morning — which, for her on a Sunday morning, meant sometime after twelve noon.

Of course there was the little matter of sleep. Dr Bancroft had put me on a strong dose of Mirtazapine, 45 milligrams. And she told me that, if possible, I should take the first dose and not set the alarm clock: just let chemically aided sleep finally wash over me, and wake up when my body decided it wanted to resume consciousness. So I took the pill just after ten p.m., thinking: If anything the drugs will take me away from this fifty-dollar-a-night motel’s fifty-dollar-a-night decor. Then I crawled into the somewhat mildewy bed with a copy of the book I’d brought with me: a collection of poems by Philip Larkin, whom Lucy had been raving about for a while. Shortly after that evening when I ran to her house after Boston, a package from our local independent bookshop in Damariscotta arrived on my doorstep. A new American edition of Larkin’s Complete Poems, with a note from Lucy:

From all accounts, he was the worst sort of Little Englander. But as a poet, the gent really knew how to cut to the heart of the matter and address all that big four-in-the-morning stuff we don’t want to contemplate. If you don’t mind a recommendation, start with ‘Going’ on page 28. Always know you have an escape hatch and a friend here. As you wrote me a few days ago, you’re not alone. Courage and all that. Love — Lucy

The book arrived on Thursday. Though hugely touched by the gesture, and the immense kindness of her note, given the nature of the week I didn’t have the reserves of stamina to tackle anything so clearly close to the emotional bone. But I still packed it in my overnight bag before leaving today. Downing my prescribed dose of Mirtazapine I opened the volume. As suggested by Lucy I turned to page 28 and.

I read the poem once. I read it again. I sat even further up in bed and went through it a third time. So that’s where I’ve been for the past few years. The shroud of despair which I mistook for everyday vestments, and which I had pulled over myself, thinking it was my destiny to wear it. I had become convinced that sadness was a condition I simply had to bear. As much as I still ached for Richard — thinking back that, around this time last year, we were making love in that big hotel bed in Boston — I also knew, after reading that extraordinary Larkin poem, that Richard was very much someone who, given the prospect of happiness, decided the hair shirt of ongoing sorrow was one he simply had to wear. He broke both our hearts by making that choice. But what the Larkin poem told me — that the veil of sadness is always there to enshroud us, should we so choose it — was strangely comforting. Because it reminded me that, yes, I wasn’t alone. even if I also knew that the wake of grief trailing me wouldn’t dissipate for some time to come.

Then I felt the ether of grogginess drift over me. I switched off the light. With the blackout came, for the first time in days, that vanishing act from life’s harder realities. Sleep.

The pills worked wonders. They knocked me out every night and ensured that I stayed knocked out for at least seven hours. The ongoing sleep — coupled with (what Dr Bancroft called) the mild anti-depressive properties of Mirtazapine — seemed to let me get through the day without falling victim to the deeper recesses of my sadness.

But I was still sad. I was still not getting over it. Around a week after I’d started taking the pills, Dan surprised me by making an amorous move in bed one night (his pre-dawn schedule and my silent melancholy had, until now, kept us even more on our respective sides of the bed). I didn’t push him away. Pulling up my nightshirt, he began to make gruff, needy love to me. He was inside me within moments. He came around three minutes later. He rolled off me with a groan, then spread my legs and started trying to arouse me with his index finger. I closed my legs. I rolled over. I buried my head in the pillow.

‘You OK?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ I whispered.

‘We don’t have to stop,’ he said, kissing the back of my neck.

‘I’m tired,’ I said, shifting myself further away from him.

‘OK,’ he said quietly. ‘Goodnight.’

And there we were, alone together again in bed.

The next evening he came on to me again — a little more tenderly this time, but still with that undercurrent of rushed gruffness that had characterized our lovemaking for years. I can’t say that I was attempting to augment things — as I remained quietly detached throughout. I felt bad about my dispassionateness, because my husband was trying to re-establish a connection so long lost. All I could think about was love found, love lost — and how I was back treading domestic water with a man with whom there had been no love for years.

After our ten minutes of sex, Dan kissed me goodnight and promptly fell asleep. It was still early — around eleven p.m. — and tomorrow was Sunday. Sally was out for the evening. The house was quiet. Disquietingly so. This was the future sound of silence that would become quotidian when Sally left for college next year. The deep silence of an uneasy marriage now devoid of the necessary clamor of children, with the left-behind couple wondering how to fill the void between them.

I went down to the living room, poured a glass of red wine, and found myself reaching for The Synonym Finder — omnipresent on the small desk I had set up in a corner of the room. As I sipped the wine, I turned the pages until I came to the word I was looking for: Unhappiness. There were — and I counted them — over one hundred and twenty-two words listed to denote the dissatisfaction that is such an intrinsic part of the human condition. Flipping back to the listings under the letter H I noted that Happiness only contained eighty-one synonyms. Could it be that we search for more words to describe our pain in life rather than the pleasures we can also experience? Would I, a few years from now, on the cusp of my half-century, be sitting here late one Saturday night, flipping through the thesaurus yet again and wondering why I had forced myself to stay put?

I closed my book of synonyms. I opened the front door, I stepped out on the porch. We were now deeper into October. The mercury was on a downward curve. So I could only stand outside, covered just in a robe, for a minute or so. But in that time I resolved to end my marriage just after Sally finished school in June.

I let only two people in on my plan. Lucy knew. And Lisa Schneider knew.

I called Dr Schneider the day after I made my decision to go. She’d already been contacted by Dr Bancroft, so she was expecting my call. Lisa — we were on a first-name basis onwards from our first session — was in her mid-fifties. A tall gangly woman who radiated quiet intelligence and decency. Though she had her clinical side, she was nonetheless always engaged in my story and the way I so wanted to change its depressing narrative. Her office was near the college. I began to see her once a week, every Wednesday at eight a.m., adjusting my work schedule to start at ten that morning in the hospital. As Dan was already at work by the time I drove off to Brunswick he never knew that I was now talking with a therapist about an exit strategy from our marriage — and about everything else that had been unsettling me for years.

‘Why do you think you are one of the underlying reasons for your husband’s emotional detachment?’

‘Because the entire marriage started under the shadow of loss. My loss of Eric. Dan knew how broken I was by his death.’

‘So Dan took on that part of you when he got involved with you. He understood instinctually that you did not have the same love for him that you had for Eric. Yet he wanted to be involved with you. Sounds like he made a decision to engage with your ambivalence towards him — an ambivalence that, as you’ve reported, was clearly there from the start.’

In a later session, when I described my ongoing lack of passion for my husband — and how I was going through the motions — Lisa said:

‘But didn’t you try to be passionate with him for years. despite the fact that you never really felt the love for Dan that you did for Eric?’

‘That still makes me guilty of being with someone for two decades whom I never should have been with, and wasting his time as well.’

‘So Dan never had the capacity to leave you, to register your diffidence towards him? To think, I can do better.’

‘I could have been a better wife.’

‘Did you ever reject him physically?’

‘No. Whenever he wanted sex I never pushed him away.’

‘Did you ever criticize him, make him feel small, insignificant?’

‘I was always trying to keep him buoyed, especially after he was fired.’

‘Did you ever, before a few weeks ago, sleep with another man during the course of your marriage?’

I shook my head.

‘Given what you’ve reported to me — his isolation, his emotional distance, his anger towards you — do you really blame yourself for having an affair?’

I lowered my head and felt my eyes go all moist.

‘I still love Richard.’

‘Because he showed you love?’

‘Because he was so right. And I lost him.’

‘“Lost him” makes it sound as though it was your fault he went back to his wife. Whereas the truth is, having agreed together to leave your respective spouses he got a case of profoundly cold feet. So why was that your fault?’

‘Because I feel it’s always my fault.’

They call it ‘the talking cure’. I don’t know if it cured anything, as every time I drove through Bath I had a stab of sadness that would then linger for hours. There would be frequent moments while having sex with Dan — it was never ‘making love’ — when I would remember Richard’s touch, his hardness, his absolute desire for me. There were times at the dinner table — especially on nights when Sally was at Brad’s and Dan and I were alone — when I would get to talking about something I’d read in that week’s New York Times Book Review, and Dan would try to show interest, and I would be reminded of the way Richard would be so engaged when it came to anything literary, and how animated the conversation always was between us.

Months passed. Winter edged into spring. I did my work. I spoke twice a week with Ben and saw him once a month — and helped him through a difficult patch when that amazing abstract painting he was working on was turned down for the big Maine Artists show that May; the reason given that he was the student artist selected last year, and they couldn’t bestow the honor on him again. Though Ben understood this logic the rejection still bothered him. There were a few weeks where we were talking daily, as his self-doubt had become more vocal again, and he wondered aloud on several occasions whether he was good enough to really make it in the ultra-competitive art world.

‘Of course you are,’ I said. ‘You know how your professors and the people at the Portland Museum of Art rate you.’

‘They still rejected the painting.’

‘It wasn’t a rejection — and you know the rationale behind their decision. It’s a fantastic piece of work. It will find a home somewhere.’

‘And you are the eternal optimist.’

‘I’m hardly that.’

‘But you seem to be in a better place than a couple of months ago. Are things improved with Dad?’

I chose my next words carefully:

‘Things are somewhat better with me.’

Because things were quietly progressing towards the big change I would institute shortly. I’d found a job — as a senior radiographic technician at the Maine Medical Center down in Portland. Besides being the most prestigious hospital in the state it had also attracted so much medical talent from Boston, New York and the other big East Coast cities, for all those ‘lifestyle’ reasons that local magazines trumpet. The radiography department was a significantly larger one than our modest operation in Damariscotta. There would clearly be far more patient traffic and professional pressures than I had been dealing with. I found the head radiologist — a woman named Dr Conrad — very curt and to the point. But during my interview it was evident that she was impressed. I had taken Dr Harrild into my confidence when it came to applying for this job (especially as a reference from him would be crucial). And Dr Conrad did say, after offering me the job, that I had received the most glowing recommendation from ‘your boss’ in Damariscotta. The job paid $66,000 a year — a $15,000 improvement on my current post. I found the apartment in Portland. Through Lucy I also found a lawyer in South Portland who told me that, as long as my husband didn’t contest things, she could get the divorce through for around $2,000. Sally got accepted at the University of Maine, Orono, where she’ll eventually major in business studies (‘because I like the idea of making money’). She was surprisingly resilient when Brad dropped her the week after their graduation.

‘I knew it was coming,’ she said when she broke the news to me. ‘And when you know someone’s going to eventually dump you, hey. can you really sit there and cry when it happens?’

But when you don’t know that someone’s going to dump you.

A week after this conversation Sally took off for a summer job as a camp counselor in the Sebago Lake region in the west of the state. Ben, meanwhile, had received some truly good news — a year-long junior year fellowship at the Kunstakademie in Berlin. They only take two dozen American undergraduates a year. His new painting apparently clinched the deal for him. He was beyond dazzled by his acceptance, and was already immersed in learning everything imaginable about Berlin. To earn money for the year ahead he took a job at the summer school in Farmington, teaching painting. Meanwhile I found the apartment in Portland — and did the deal with the landlord about redecorating it myself in exchange for a lower rent.

‘So when are you going to ask Ben if he and some friends would like to do the work?’ Lisa Schneider asked me in one of our sessions around that time.

‘When I get the courage up to tell Dan I’m moving out.’

‘And what’s stopping you, especially now that Sally’s finished school?’

‘Fear.’

‘Of what?’ she asked.

‘Of hurting him.’

‘He may be hurt—’

‘He will be hurt.’

‘Nonetheless that will be his problem, not yours. My question to you is, do you want to go?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Then have the conversation. It will be difficult. It will be painful. But once it is done, it will be behind you.’

I made final plans. On the week of June 15th I quietly moved a few things into Lucy’s spare apartment, as the Portland place wouldn’t be free until August 1st. Hoping I could convince Ben and friends to start work around August 10th (when his summer school duties were over) I figured I could take up residence there by Labor Day. I had two meetings with the lawyer in South Portland — who was primed and ready to put the divorce in motion. Then, on the day I decided I would break the news to Dan, I also gave notice at the hospital, knowing full well that word of my departure from my job would be around town the next morning. Which is why I timed my resignation to take place just an hour before I came home. After fixing dinner for us, I asked Dan if we could sit out on the front porch for a while and take in the reclining light of early evening.

Once settled there I came out with it. Told him that I’d been unhappy for a very long time; that I felt there was nowhere to go in the marriage; that I didn’t think we were a good fit anymore; that, as hard as this was to do, I simply had to leave and start a life without him.

He said nothing as I explained all this. He said nothing as I told him about the job in Portland, and how I’d be moving into Lucy’s garage apartment before the place I found near Maine Medical was ready for occupancy. He said nothing when I explained that I had found a lawyer who was willing to do a no-fault divorce for us very reasonably, that I didn’t want much, that he could take the house, but I did want the savings plan we had put money into over the years (and into which I did all of the contributing for the past two years), and which was worth about $85,000. Since the only other asset of ours was the house with a market value of about $165,000, he’d be coming out ahead. And—

Before I could continue he interrupted me, his face white with anger.

‘I always knew this was going to happen — because I always knew you were so ambivalent about me.’

‘I’m afraid that’s the truth.’

‘So who’s the guy?’

‘There is no “guy”.’

‘But there was a guy, right?’

‘I am not leaving you for someone else.’

‘You’re dodging my question. Because I know that if there isn’t someone now, there was someone. And I’m pretty damn certain you met him that weekend you were in Boston.’

Silence — during which I decided to drive the car straight off the cliff.

‘That’s right,’ I said, meeting Dan’s shocked gaze. ‘There was someone. It just lasted the weekend. Then it ended. Then I came home, quietly hoping that things between us could improve. They didn’t. And now I’m going.’

‘Just like that.’

‘You know we’ve been in a bad place for years.’

‘Which is why you fucked some other guy.’

‘That’s right. If this marriage hadn’t turned moribund, I would never have dreamed of—’

‘“Moribund”,’ he said, repeating the word with contempt.

‘Me and my big words again, right?’

‘You’re beneath contempt.’

‘Thank you for such clarity. It makes this much easier.’

And I stood up and walked to my car and drove away.

Earlier that morning, after Dan had gone off to work, I had packed a final suitcase and dropped it off at Lucy’s. During lunch I had returned home and cleared away my laptop, my favorite fountain pens and notebooks, and several key books, including, of course, The Synonym Finder. These items were already packed into the trunk of my car. When I got to Lucy’s house and began to unload them I had a small private moment of grief. Lucy arrived home from the supermarket a few minutes later with food for our dinner that night. Seeing the red around my eyes she asked me:

‘Was it that bad?’

‘Actually, he was more angry than hurt — which was easier to deal with.’

‘The hurt will come later.’

I drove over to Farmington the next day to see Ben, a date I’d arranged with him earlier in the week. When I got there he told me that his father had called him late last night and was crying down the line, telling him that I was leaving him.

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘He told me you’d been unfaithful to him.’

Oh God. I put my head in my hands.

‘I wish he hadn’t said that.’

‘Well, I kind of knew that already, didn’t I? Or, at least, worked it out after we had that talk following your Boston trip.’

‘Your father still shouldn’t have involved you.’

‘I agree — but the guy is clearly so distressed by what’s happened he’s decided to lash out in all directions.’

‘I’m so sorry. What happened — it was just a weekend thing. And the only reason it happened is because—’

‘You don’t have to explain, Mom. I might not like what I heard, but I am certainly not going to take his side in all this. And I’m pleased that you’ve moved out. as long as, wherever you are, there will always be a spare bedroom for me.’

‘I promise you there will always be a room for you in whatever home I have for the rest of my life.’

Then I pitched him the idea of me hiring him and a couple of friends to do the renovations on the apartment in Portland. He was immediately enthusiastic, saying he’d talk to two fellow art students he knew who did a lot of part-time decorating.

‘You’ve come to the right place for home improvements, ma’am,’ he said, his voice arch and funny. But then:

‘I do have to tell you something, Mom. After what went down with Dad last night I took it on myself to call Sally on her cell at the camp. And I told her what had happened, and what Dad had told me.’

Oh God. but this time to the power of ten.

‘The way I figured it,’ Ben continued, ‘if I didn’t tell her first Dad would have. And that would have really thrown her. Thrown her badly.’

‘You did the right thing,’ I said, thinking to myself: Why is it that when people lash out in fury they do their best to entangle those closest to them in their web of harm?

I had already arranged to drive down and see Sally at Camp Sebago the next morning. I was fully expecting her to call me a scarlet woman (or worse), and slam a metaphoric door in my face. To my surprise, however, she put her arms around me when I showed up and said:

‘It’s going to take me a long time to forgive my father for saying all that shit.’

We went out to lunch. I was as direct as possible with her about how her father and I had fallen out of love. I assured her that she could always count on me for everything, and that me moving to Portland wasn’t me disappearing from her life.

‘I kind of worked that one out already, Mom. I also worked out something else — you waited all this time to leave because you didn’t want to mess up my last years of high school. And I am incredibly grateful to you for that.’

Life moved forward. My lawyer, Amanda Montgomery, counseled me not to say anything to Dan about his attempts to get Ben and Sally into his camp:

‘Your children have already seen through that tactic — what we want to do now is get a deal in place without too much drama.’

Still, she had to send some very stern letters to the lawyer representing Dan, asking him to tell his client that if he made absurd demands — like wanting the house and half of the savings account and everything that I didn’t take with me when I moved into that temporary apartment at Lucy’s — we would now demand half the house etc. Did he really want to spend thousands in legal bills, especially when I was asking for so little and there was so little to actually divide?

Dan saw sense. The two lawyers met once and hammered out an agreement. Dan asked that it not be signed for a couple of months to give us both time to think about it; which was clearly his way of hoping against hope that I would change my mind. The curious thing was, once I had left the house he never phoned me — preferring to communicate by email, and only when he had something practical to discuss regarding the house or our children. According to Amanda — who gleaned this information from Dan’s lawyer — my husband still wanted me to make the first move when it came to reconciliation, even though he had to understand that, as I was the one who’d left the marriage, that was never going to happen.

‘People go truly strange in the wake of a long marriage detonating,’ Amanda said. ‘I sense that your husband simply can’t face up to what’s happening — and expects you to make it all right for him. Which, as I explained to his lawyer, was something you had repeatedly informed me was beyond the realm of possibility.’

‘I feel sorry for him.’

‘Not as sorry as he feels for himself.’

News of our impending divorce got around Damariscotta in the expected matter of nanoseconds. But the hospital still organized a goodbye drink for me; a little after-work soirйe at the Newcastle Publick House in town. To my immense surprise, Sally showed up. And then, around an hour into the proceedings, in walked Ben.

‘Surprise,’ he said quietly, planting a kiss on my cheek.

Dr Harrild made a little speech, talking about how I knew more about things radiographic than he did, and how my ‘professional rigor’ was ‘matched by an immense decency’, and how the hospital would be a lesser place without me. I found myself blushing. I have never been totally at ease with praise. But when asked to speak, after thanking Dr Harrild and all my colleagues for such interesting years and such ‘ongoing colleagiality’, I then said this (having thought it through beforehand):

‘If there’s one thing I know about my work it’s that it constantly reminds me of the enigmas we all live with. The discovery that what seems to be evident is frequently cloudy; that we are all so profoundly vulnerable, yet also so profoundly resilient; that, out of nowhere, our story can change. I’m always dealing with people in extremis, in real possible danger, and grappling so often with fear. Everyone I have ever scanned or X-rayed has a story — their story. But though my equipment peers behind the outer layer we all have, if all these years at the hospital have taught me anything it is that everyone is a mystery. Most especially to themselves.’

Three days later I awoke at five and headed south to Portland, reporting as agreed at an early hour to go through the usual employee registration process: being photographed and fingerprinted, being issued an ID and parking sticker, doing all the paperwork to transfer me to the hospital’s health scheme, being given a complete checkup by a staff doctor, then spending much of the day being taken around by a soon-to-be-retiring technologist named Ruth Redding — who, in her own quiet way, made it clear that this was the closest Maine came to a high-pressured urban hospital. Radiography operated day and night, ‘and though we might not be Mass General, the pressure is always on. But, trust me, it’s never less than interesting — and from what I saw in your file, you can handle the pressure.’

Pressurized it was, especially as we were very much an adjunct of the ER and seemed to be dealing with at least a dozen bad accidents per day. Then there was the booked-full stream of scheduled procedures — and the need to maintain time-management efficiency (in Damariscotta we might have an entire forty-five minutes twice a day when no patient was scheduled, and accident cases usually were rushed to the bigger hospital in Brunswick). The head of radiology, Dr Conrad, was hyper-rigorous and exacting. But I had worked with this sort of boss in the past — and decided to show her, early on, that I would match her professionalism and clinical cool. Though she was notoriously closed-lipped when it came to praising others (as the other technologists in the department told me), she did turn to me after a few weeks on the job and say: ‘Hiring you was a good call.’

End of praise. But it still touched me.

‘So it’s all right accepting praise from others?’ Lisa Schneider asked during a session a few days later.

‘I’ll tell you something rather interesting — the crying fits that used to characterize so much of the last year have largely stopped. Yes, I can still get deeply affected by a patient. There was a sixteen-year-old girl in last week with what was clearly a major malignancy in her uterus — and that was a tough hour. But I didn’t break down afterwards, as I had done so often last year.’

‘And why do you think that is?’

I shrugged, then said:

‘I don’t know. maybe the fact that I am no longer in an unhappy marriage. I can’t say I am in a happy place myself. but then again, as you keep telling me, this is a period of serious transition, so don’t expect “inner peace” or zen-like calm.’

Lisa Schneider looked at me quizzically.

‘Now I think you’re putting words in my mouth.’

‘Actually, those were Sally’s words — when I settled her into her dorm room at U Maine last weekend. “You’re looking a little happier, Mom. Don’t tell me you’ve gone all inner peace and zen on me.”’

‘How did all that go with Sally?’

‘It was a wrench, seeing my youngest child now starting college, for all the obvious reasons. Then again, having moved out of the house a few weeks before, there wasn’t that terrible silence of coming home afterwards to the proverbial empty nest. Dan suffered that, however. We agreed by email that I would settle Sally in on Friday and Saturday, then leave Sunday morning — and he’d come up and see her then. Around ten o’clock that night, long after Dan usually goes to bed, I got a call on my cellphone. It was my soon-to-be ex-husband. Sounding beyond sad. Saying that coming home to this empty house was beyond awful. Telling me how stupid he had been. How if he could turn back the clock. ’

‘And how did you reply to all this?’

‘I was polite. I never once mentioned how he had talked about my affair with our children, and how monstrous I thought that all was. But when he asked if he could come over now and see me — that he really wanted to try and work things out — I was very definitive. I simply said no. That’s when he started to cry.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘Sad, of course. But — and this was an interesting change — not guilty at all.’

‘That is an interesting change,’ she said.

‘It’s all interesting change, isn’t it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Something else happened a few days ago. During coffee break at the hospital I picked up the Portland Press Herald that is always left for us in the staff room every morning. Turned a page, saw a small item in the “In State” columns — the suicide of a prisoner at the State Psychiatric Prison Hospital in Bangor. William Copeland, age twenty-six. Richard’s son.’

‘What terrible news,’ she said with studied neutrality.

‘I was very shaken by it.’

‘Because?’

‘Because. Billy would have been my stepson, had everything worked out as we — I — had hoped. Because I felt so sorry for Richard. Because I still feel so insanely confused about my feelings for him. Part of me still loves him. Part of me is finally somewhat angry about it all — which I know you will tell me is “good”, because you think my inability to express anger has caused me to throw up these blockages that have stymied my life, right?’

‘You tell me.’

Oh God, how she wielded that line all the time like a scalpel.

‘I am still so incredibly hurt by what happened, and how his panic cost us both so much. Part of me thinks, What a coward. Part of me also thinks, What a sad man. Part of me also thinks, Thanks to Richard I was able to get out of my marriage. Right now, I so feel for him. He loved Billy. His son’s life was such a tragic one.’

I fell quiet for a few moments. Then:

‘A day or so after reading the piece about Billy’s suicide I sent Richard an email. Short. To the point. Telling him how what he was now going through was the worst thing that could befall a parent, and how I was thinking about him as he negotiated this very terrible period.’

‘Did he reply?’

I shook my head.

‘Did that bother you?’

‘We can’t script anything, can we? I mean, it’s not a novel, where the writer can make happen anything actually happen. But, yes, there was a big part of me that wanted Richard to call me up, tell me he had never stopped loving me, that the loss of his son had finally freed him from any sense of ongoing emotional guilt when it came to the wife he’d never really loved, and — then — he shows up on my doorstep and, voilа, the happy ending that never really arrives in life.’

‘But say that did happen? Would you open the door to him now?’

‘Yes, I would. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be a little wary as well. But what we discovered in each other that weekend, what we shared. I am not going to diminish it by saying I spent those three days living a middle-aged romantic hallucination that had no bearing on actual reality. Better than anyone — because I have taken it apart so much with you — you know that, for me, this was so completely real. As I know it was for Richard as well. So I can say something really obvious like, “Life is sometimes so unfair.” But the truth is, we are usually so unfair to ourselves.’

‘And knowing that now.?’

I shrugged again.

‘I still mourn what should have been. Just as I know that I can now do nothing about it. Maybe that’s the hardest lesson here — realizing I can’t fix things.’

‘Or others?’

‘That too. And now you’re going to tell me, “But you can fix yourself.”’

‘Can you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘An honest answer.’

The only answer.

I moved into the new apartment. All the furniture I’d ordered from assorted secondhand shops around Portland arrived over a forty-eight-hour period. Ben and his two friends — Charlie and Hayden (both stoners, but sweet) — chipped in and bought a bottle of champagne to mark the occasion. Charlie had a van. He kindly drove up to Damariscotta to collect all my clothes and books. I had arranged with Dan a time when I could return to the house and pack up my library — maybe four hundred volumes — and the things we had agreed in principal that I could take with me. Charlie then transported them down with me to the new place — where the three boys also insisted on lugging everything up the stairs for me. Then we opened the champagne and toasted the great job they had done (the place really did look airy and light). After paying them each $1,000 cash I insisted on taking them all out to a local pizza joint. When I slipped off to use the washroom at the end I came back to find the bill had been paid.

Walking back to the apartment afterwards with Ben — Charlie and Hayden had decided to head off to a late-night rock joint — he let me know that ‘my friends think I have a cool mom’.

‘I’m hardly cool.’

‘That’s your take. But I’m with Charlie and Hayden — you’re cool. And the stuff you’ve chosen for the apartment — way cool. But hey, if you want to think otherwise. ’

‘Thank you.’

‘Berlin in three days.’

‘You excited?’

‘Excited, terrified, worried, a little cowed by the idea of me at the art academy there.’

‘“Cowed ”,’ I repeated. ‘Good word.’

‘Like mother like son.’

‘I am going to miss not having you down the road. But I also think this is going to be fantastic for you.’

‘And I’m going to insist that you come spend a week with me over in Berlin.’

‘I won’t be able to ask for any time off until the New Year.’

‘Easter then. The academy’s closed for a week. I sent an email to them last week. They will rent out dorm rooms to family members of students for very little. If you book now you can find a Boston — Berlin airfare for around five hundred bucks.’

‘You’ve really researched this, haven’t you?’

‘Because I know you, Mom. And I know that, though you would empty your bank account in a second for me and Sally, you hate spending a dime on yourself. And if allowed you’ll talk yourself out of this trip.’

‘You do know me too well, Ben.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Four days later, Sally arrived down in Portland by bus. We went out for Japanese food — and she stayed the night at my new apartment, telling me:

‘So you’ve been secretly reading design magazines for years, Mom.’

‘It’s hardly designer. Everything came from junk shops.’

‘Which makes this all way cooler. My only question now to you is, why didn’t we live this way when we were a family? Why didn’t you do this for us?’

Did I feel a stab of guilt? Initially yes. But then another thought came to me; a thought which was, for me anyway, an articulation of a certain truth.

‘Because I didn’t realize we could live this way. Because I spent years stymieing my imagination, my horizons. I don’t blame your father for that. It was me, myself and I who kept myself so hemmed in. And I feel bad about that.’

‘Well, it’s not like I’m going to blame you for the rest of my life. But when I finally get my own place I am going to demand payback. and get you to help me design it.’

The next morning we drove up to Farmington to collect Ben. He had just one duffel bag of clothes and one case full of art supplies for his year in Berlin. En route to Boston he announced that he wanted to stop by Norm’s Art Supplies to pick up a half-litre of Tetron Azure Blue to pack along for Berlin.

‘You mean,’ Sally asked, ‘you don’t think they sell paints at that way-too-cool Berlin art school you’re heading to?’

‘I’m sure I can easily get an azure blue over there, but not Norm’s. So indulge me here.’

‘What do you think I’ve spent my life doing?’ Sally asked.

‘So speaks the refugee from cheerleading.’

‘By the time you get back next summer I’ll be a Goth with a shaved head and a biker boyfriend.’

‘Is that a promise?’ Ben asked.

Traffic into Boston was terrible. We only had a few minutes to spare by the time we reached Norm’s. Ben had phoned ahead — and when he explained he was leaving for Berlin that night, Norm broke a rule and agreed to have the paint mixed and ready to go before getting paid for it.

I found parking outside his shop.

‘You’ve got to see this place,’ I told Sally, and we ducked inside.

‘So I get to meet the whole family,’ Norm said.

‘Just about,’ Ben said, and there was an awkward moment thereafter which Norman cleverly broke.

‘Now I have to say that I am flattered to be having my own Tetron Azure Blue accompanying you to Berlin. And if you need a refill while there.?’

‘I can always pay for it,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Ben said.

‘Here’s my email address,’ I said, writing it down for Norm.

‘And here’s my card,’ he said, all smiles. ‘Drop in any time you’re next in Boston.’

I smiled tightly.

Once back in the car, Ben noted:

‘My mother has an admirer.’

To which Sally added:

‘And even though the shop’s a little too deliberately weird and I’d get rid of that goatee if I was him, he’s kind of cool.’

‘I’m not in the market,’ I said.

‘You will be,’ Sally said.

‘Oh, please,’ I said.

‘All right, live the life of a nun then,’ Sally said. ‘All pure and sad.’

‘Haven’t you noticed,’ Ben said, ‘Mom doesn’t do sad much anymore.’

But an hour later I was very much alone. We got Ben to Logan just seventy minutes before his flight. As rushed as it was to get him checked in and over to the security checkpoint, one good thing about the lack of time was the fact that it made saying goodbye less tortured (for me anyway). Ben hugged his sister. He hugged me and promised to email as soon as he was settled in and online tomorrow. Seeing the tears in my eyes he hugged me again and said:

‘I guess you could say this is a rite of passage for us all.’

Then he headed off, turning back once after he cleared the boarding-pass check to give us a fast wave. A moment later he headed into the security maze. Other passengers crowded in behind him. And I had to cope with the realization that I would not be seeing my son until Easter of next year.

Sally had prearranged to meet a group of friends that night in Boston. I’d offered to drop her off at the cafй on Newbury Street where she was due to hook up with them, but was relieved when she insisted on taking public transport into the city. Newbury Street still had too many shadows for me.

‘You going to be OK?’ she asked as we parted in front of the international terminal.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘And anytime you want to escape Orono for the bright lights of Portland. ’

‘You’ll be seeing me often, Mom. Especially because of your cool apartment.’

Then, with a final hug, she jumped the bus to the nearby T-station. She waved again as the vehicle headed out into the early-evening traffic. Then she too was gone.

A few hours later I walked back into my apartment. All the way north I was dreading the moment when I first stepped inside, shutting the door behind me, thinking: I am very much by myself. Though I had no desire whatsoever to be back in the place once called ‘our house’, returning to this empty apartment tonight was more than a little hard. Ben was correct: this was another rite of passage. And life is, verily, like this. The ties that bind are inevitably picked apart — by biology, by change, by disaffection, by the inexorable forward momentum within which we all travel. With the result that, at some juncture, you do come home to an empty home. And its silence is as huge as it is chilling.

The next morning I awoke late (by which I mean nine a.m.) to a text from Ben:

I’m here. Jet-lagged and weirded out. Sharing a room with a crazy sculptor from Sarajevo. Hey, it’s not Kansas, Toto. Love — Ben

There was also, surprisingly, an email from the famous Norm of Norm’s Art Supplies; a rather witty missive in which he hoped I wouldn’t consider him a stalker for dispatching this communiquй to me, and that he isn’t in the habit of hitting on customers (let alone mothers of customers), but he was wondering out loud now if we might be able to meet up for dinner the next time I found myself in Boston. Or I could meet him somewhere between Portland and Boston like Portsmouth (‘the only non-fascist town in New Hampshire’). He went on to explain that he was divorced with a sixteen-year-old daughter named Iris, and ‘an ex-wife who married a mutual funds guy as a way of refuting all those bohemian years with yours truly’, and that he wasn’t going to tell me that his favorite color was black, his favorite Beatle was John, the person in history he identified with wasn’t Jackson Pollock (‘I don’t drive drunk’), and this was the offer of a dinner, no more. ‘Or maybe movie and a dinner, if there’s something interesting playing at the Brattle Street. the last great revival house holdout.’

I smiled a bit while reading the email. He did have a nice, self-deprecating comic touch. But the mention of the Brattle Street Cinema was like the mention of Newbury Street yesterday: a remembrance which triggered a flash of sadness that, though dissipated, still had, all these months later, the ability to unsettle me; to remind me that, as much as I felt myself ever freer from the bonds of despair, the grief could still reassert itself out of nowhere.

There was only one solution to such an unsettling moment: a run. I squinted out my window at the day outside. Overcast, dark, but the impending rain had yet to fall. Five minutes later I was in my running clothes and shoes, pounding the pavement, each stride an attempt to distance myself further from the heartache that, like a stubborn stain, simply would not wash clean.

When I returned home from my five-mile cascade I sent a brief note to Norm:

I’m flattered. but am not in a place to even entertain the idea of a nice dinner with a clearly nice and interesting man. When and if that changes, I’ll send you an email. though, by that time, some smart woman will have snapped you up.

Was I flirting with him? Of course. But I also knew that, for the foreseeable, all I could do was keep running.

I was running when I saw him. Running down a corridor of the radiography unit, having just X-rayed a fifty-nine-year-old construction worker whose left leg had been trapped under a falling steel beam (it was a mess). I had an ultrasound to do on a young mother (seventeen years old) with a suspected ectopic pregnancy. That was three minutes from now. Life in our unit is very much a time-and-motion study, an endless attempt to keep to the very tight schedule we work under, punctuated by emergency cases like the poor man who’d just arrived with a limb that had been virtually pulverized. But three minutes meant time for a much-needed coffee, though not enough time to run back to the staff room and use the very decent Nespresso machine that the six of us in radiography all chipped in $35 each to buy. So I stopped at the vending machine in the hallway that runs between the X-ray, ultrasound, and scanning suites. The public waiting room is also just off this corridor, which means you often run into patients and their families in front of the vending machines. Given how little time I had — and how slow that coffee machine was — I sighed an inward groan when I saw a man putting money in its slot. From a distance I could see he was in his fifties, gray-haired, old-style glasses, a zip-up golf jacket in a mid-blue fabric. Hearing my hurried footsteps he looked up. And that’s when I caught sight of Richard Copeland.

He blanched at first sight of me. Looking beyond shocked. Mortified. I too was stopped in my tracks. I immediately took in just how much he had returned to looking like the man I first met that Friday at the hotel check-in. Only now the chatty charm he had displayed from the outset had been replaced by an aura of world-weariness, of resignation. As befits a man who had lost so much. Most especially his son. He met my stunned gaze for a moment, then turned away.

‘Hello, Richard,’ I said.

He said nothing.

‘What brings you to my corner of the world?’ I asked.

‘My wife. She needs a scan. Some spinal thing. Nothing life threatening. More a curvature thing. They had a space here before Midcoast in Brunswick. So. ’

I glanced down at the chart I held in my hand. A chart listing my next five appointments before lunch break. Muriel Copeland was not listed there. Sometimes there is a God.

Richard saw me check my chart.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘she’s having the scan done now.’

‘I hope she’ll be OK. How are you?’

He gave me the most cursory of shrugs, then looked up at me again, taking me in this time.

‘You look wonderful,’ he finally said.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I was so horrified and saddened to hear about Billy.’

He bit down on his lower lip and bent his head again. Then, in a near whisper:

‘Thank you.’

‘I don’t know how you cope with such a terrible—’

‘I don’t talk about that anymore.’

His tone was abrupt, like a door slammed shut.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘I heard you’re no longer living in Damariscotta.’

‘And where did you hear that?’

‘It’s a small state.’

Silence. Then he said:

‘I made a mistake. A big mistake.’

‘So it goes.’

‘I think about it all the time.’

‘So do I.’

Silence.

His coffee finished dispensing. He let the cup sit there.

‘So you live in Portland now?’ he asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Are you happy?’

‘Happier.’

Silence. I checked my watch. I said:

‘My next patient awaits me. So. ’

‘I’ve never stopped—’

I held up my hand.

‘That’s the past tense.’

Silence. He hung his head.

‘I wish you well, Richard.’

And I walked away.

I ran when I got home that night. I ran the next morning. I ran and ran and ran. Six days a week, five miles a day. Rarely heading out in the evening — unless the old distress was creeping in. Always up before dawn. Always heading across Casco Bay, careening my way through assorted neighborhoods, encircling the Portland lighthouse, saluting that septuagenarian fellow jogger with a quick wave, then pushing my way towards home.

Home.

The realtor called me last week, informing me the owners of the apartment — a retired couple who now live most of the time in Florida — needed to sell the place. And they needed a fast sale. As in, they would be willing to accept $190,000 if I was willing to close on the sale within two months.

‘Let me think about that,’ I said.

I called Lucy. She called a man named Russell Drake in Brunswick who organized mortgages. Money was cheap right now, he explained. Around $75 a month repayment per $1,000 borrowed. So if I was to borrow $150,000 dollars for a period of twenty-five years, I’d be paying $1,350 dollars a month. just a bit more than what I was paying right now for rent. And yes, the sum borrowed would be the equivalent of two and a half years of my salary at the hospital, so several banks would be most pleased to offer me a mortgage. ‘You’ll probably have a bunch of suitors — which means we can negotiate the finer points to your advantage. And yes, I think a two-month closing is perfectly doable. So shall we meet within the next day or so and get the ball rolling?’

I called the realtor back and said:

‘One sixty-five is what I can pay. If the sellers accept that, we can close within the time frame they want.’

The offer was accepted the next morning.

Home.

The apartment no longer would be someone else’s property in which I was loitering for a spell. It would be mine — and a place for Ben and Sally to return to in the years to come before it became theirs. The place you ‘return to’ inevitably becomes the place you ‘come into’. As my father used to say, the farce of life is grounded in one terrible truth: we are all just passing through.

Home.

On the morning that I was to sign my divorce agreement I did my post-dawn run, then came home and showered and changed into a suit — the one suit I own. The black suit I wore at my father’s funeral. The suit I should have augmented with another suit by now. But since I never wear suits.

There was absolutely no need to put on these funereal clothes — except that something within me told me I should mark the occasion formally. Even though my lawyer said that she could mail or courier the papers to me at home or work, I told her I would come by her office and sign them myself.

And if you are signing a legally binding document that is about to end a two-decade relationship — and one which has taken up half my life — dressing formally for the occasion seems only appropriate.

Amanda Montgomery’s office was a ten-minute drive across Casco Bridge in an old warehouse building in South Portland. A quasi-funky, quasi-gentrified area. Amanda was a large, relentlessly cheerful woman around my age. She worked alone — only employing a receptionist who doubled as her bookkeeper, secretary and general major-domo. She made a point throughout the divorce of trying to keep the process as non-disputative as possible in order to keep the cost reasonable. She coolly stood down Dan’s initial belligerence. Once he saw sense (and it was his lawyer who — according to Amanda — got him to lose his anger and realize that we were offering him a very good deal), it was simply a matter of ‘the usual legal and state bureaucracy — and a considerable amount of tedious paperwork’.

Here I was today, on time for our prearranged morning meeting, being offered coffee by her assistant before being ushered into Amanda’s office.

‘My, you’re dressed up,’ she said as I came in. Her office had a big old-fashioned wooden desk. A big high-back swivel chair, also very much a throwback to the 1930s, a pair of overstuffed armchairs for clients. A small conference table, covered with documents. Amanda was dressed in a similarly somber suit, and explained she was due in court in an hour ‘to try to stop my client from being eviscerated by his soon-to-be ex-wife. Your ex doesn’t know how lucky he was that you were not interested in the sort of scorched-earth divorce I am trying to quell right now. Then again, did he ever know how lucky he was?’

‘You’d have to ask him that,’ I said quietly.

‘Somehow I don’t think that opportunity’s ever going to arise. Anyway, you have a job to go to, and I have a courtroom fistfight to go to. So all we have to do now is sign the papers and they will get shipped back to the court for official judicial signature. Then they will go up to Augusta where the actual Final Decree is issued.’

I nodded, saying nothing. I could see Amanda studying me.

‘You OK, Laura?’

‘You mean, am I having second thoughts?’

‘That has, in my experience, happened. though, most of the time, six months later, the client was back here again.’

‘I’ve never had second thoughts from the moment I decided to end the marriage.’

‘I always knew that. But I am still bound — not by law, but by my own set of rules — to ask that question before a client signs the papers and things are all but writ in stone.’

‘I wish I had second thoughts.’

‘It’s a terrible moment, even if it’s the right decision. The death of—’

‘Hope,’ I heard myself saying. ‘The death of hope.’

I blinked and felt tears. Amanda said:

‘I’ve sat here and seen the toughest businessmen in the state — real cutthroat bastards — sobbing their eyes out before signing the papers. One guy — I can’t tell you who he is or what he does, because you’d know his name — old schoolfriend of mine which is how I got the case. he actually spent almost half an hour just staring at the document before I gently told him that his wife was categorical about the fact that the marriage was over. “I’m afraid you have to sign the papers.” But he kept shaking his head, all disbelief. The death of hope. You got that one right. But when one hope dies—’

‘It really dies,’ I said, cutting her off before she could talk about new hopes, new dawns, buds sprouting from barren land, sunlight always following the darkest of nights.

‘Sorry, did I say the wrong thing?’ Amanda asked.

‘No. I believe in hope as much as the next fool. I just know that disappointment is such an equal part of the equation.’

‘Well, they’re counterweights, aren’t they? And you are, in essence, signing off on disappointment this morning.’

‘And signing on for what?’

‘Whatever you do or find next in your life. Which could be wonderful or terrible or just plain banal or a mixture of all of the above. But whatever arises, even if you make the worst decision or choice imaginable, it will all be driven by one basic thing — hope. Which is the one commodity we all desperately want to hang onto. And that’s my sermon for the morning,’ she said with a smile. ‘Shall we get this done?’

She ushered me over to the conference table — and a legal document. I’d already read the draft some weeks ago and then the final fine-tuned version just last week.

‘Nothing’s changed in the interim,’ she said. ‘But if you’d like to read it through again. ’

‘No need.’

She proffered a pen. She flipped through the document to a signature page right at the end of it all. I looked down and saw that Dan had gotten there before me — as his tightly knotted signature adorned the line above his printed name.

‘The other side did the deed yesterday afternoon. Then his lawyer dropped the papers in here yesterday evening on his way to a hockey game. Very Maine, eh?’

The pen was shaking in my hand. Why is it that your body so often tells you things that your mind is trying to dodge?

I steadied my hand. Signing the divorce agreement took two seconds. Then I pushed the document away. I wiped my eyes. I took a deep becalming breath. I sat there, knowing I had to move. Amanda put a hand on my shoulder.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Not really. But. ’

‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked.

‘What everyone else does. I’m going to go to work.’

I saw the cancer immediately. It was right there in front of me. A cancer called despair.

The patient was a woman who was exactly my age. Born three months after me. A native Mainer, she told me. ‘Not from away’, but someone who went away to a ‘pretty good college’ in the Pacific northwest and ‘an even better’ law school in Boston, and was groomed for big things in a big ‘white shoe’ Beacon Hill law firm. She married a hotshot financial whizz kid and they lived far too well. ‘Life in the fast lane.’ Then he got caught on an insider trading scam, and his legal fees wiped them out, and she never made it beyond associate in that ultra-prestigious, ultra-WASP law firm (where she was just one of three lawyers without an Ivy League degree) because of her husband’s conviction and seven years in a Club Fed sentence. After all that, she had nine months where she was out of work. Then a friend of her dad’s found her a job in one of the bigger law firms here in Portland. Coming back to Maine wasn’t what she really wanted. But having a soon-to-be ex-husband in prison for financial fraud wasn’t helping her employment prospects, and it was a prestigious outfit ‘as Maine firms go’. Even though she was finding a lot of the contractual work she’d been given to do this side of boring (‘Hell, I’m a born litigator’), she was making enough to live in that condo development off the Old Port, and—

‘By the way, my name is Caroline and I’m nervous as shit.’

I told her my name and explained, in my usual professionally calm voice, the scanning procedure and how, outside of the needle in her arm—

‘I hate needles.’

‘A small momentary prick and then it’s done.’

‘And I’m not ten years old and you don’t have to promise me a lollipop at the end.’

‘We do have them if you really want one.’

‘That’s your way of telling me I’m a bitch, right? Paul always says that. Says when I get into one of these manic moods I am fucking impossible.’

‘A scan is always stressful.’

‘And you are Miss Zen-o-rama.’

If only you knew, if only you knew.

‘I know how worried you must be now,’ I continued. ‘But—’

‘But what? I have a lump in my left breast, a very big lump near a very important lymph node. And though my doctor wanted me to have a mammogram I insisted on a CT scan — because with a CT scan you can see how seriously the cancer has metastasized. So you’re now telling me what? To try to stay calm and focussed and centered and all that New Age shit? Did my doctor tell you I’m four months’ pregnant?’

‘It’s there on your chart, yes.’

‘But what she didn’t tell you is that this is the first pregnancy that I have been able to carry beyond the initial trimester. I fell pregnant twice while married. Boom. Two miscarriages at eight and eleven weeks respectively. Now I’m pregnant again — at forty-three. An unmarried mother. Not that my firm knows anything about this yet. If I can hold onto the baby — if my body shows me a little grace this time — I am going to probably find myself professionally demoted. Especially if the father of the baby — who happens to be a partner in the same firm — leaves his wife for me. Which I don’t think he’ll do. Which is pulling him apart and pulling me apart. Because we love each other. Because we’re so right for each other. And because I feel that, yet again, life has dealt me the shittiest hand imaginable, even though I know it was my choice to get involved with him, my choice to fall in love with him, my choice to get pregnant by him — a very deliberate choice, I should add, but you probably figured that out by now. And I bet all this is being taken down on a hidden microphone and is going to be used against me.’

‘Fear not,’ I said, helping her onto the bier and strapping her down. ‘Anything you say here stays here.’

‘So you’re my father confessor, right?’

I swabbed her arm with an antiseptic wipe.

‘Here comes the needle.’

Her entire body stiffened — always a sign in my professional experience of someone who expects the pain to be deservedly painful. The needle slipped in. I taped it down. I explained that the whole procedure would last ten, fifteen minutes at most.

‘I know it’s cancer,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on the Internet. Crawling all over the Mayo Clinic’s website. From non-stop self-examination I know that it has all the telltale signs of a malignant tumor.’

‘As I’ve often told so many people I see here, stay off the Internet when it comes to lumps and growths and blood being passed.’

‘But you’ve got to understand — my entire adult life has been about things being taken away from me. My husband. Our home. Two wonderful babies. And now, given how the cards keep falling for me, at best I am going to lose a breast and probably the child when they put me on a huge course of chemotherapy. Given my age this will be the last time I ever get pregnant. And—’

‘Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves here?’

‘I’m going to die.’

‘Did your doctor indicate that?’

‘She did what all you people in the medical world do — commit to nothing until you have the actual death warrant in your hand.’

‘And your boyfriend — Paul, right? What does he say about all this?’

‘He came with me today.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Before I came in here he told me how much he loved me.’

‘That’s even better.’

‘The thing is, he’ll never leave his wife. He’s told me recently that, yes, he would move in with me when the pregnancy started to show. But he knows what that will do to his standing at the firm. And his wife is the niece of the senior partner.’

‘But it is, nonetheless, love?’

I could see she was crying.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is love.’

‘That, in itself, is wonderful.’

‘I keep telling myself that. But. ’

I wanted to say: I know all about that ‘but’. Instead I squeezed her shoulder and said:

‘Let’s get this behind you.’

I left the scan room as quietly and quickly as I could, moving into the technical booth. As I programed in the necessary data I felt the usual moment of tension that still accompanies the start of each of these procedures. The realization that, from the moment I shoot 80 milligrams of high-contrast iodine into Caroline’s veins, I will then have less than fifty seconds to start the scan. Begin the scan a few critical seconds ahead of the Venus phase — when all the veins are freshly enhanced with the iodine — and you will be scanning ahead of the contrast, which means you will not get the images that the radiologist needs to make a thorough and accurate diagnosis. Scan too late and the contrast might be too great.

Timing.

It really is everything.

I leaned in to the microphone on the control panel and flipped a switch.

‘Caroline?’

My voice boomed out on the speaker within the scan room. She shifted her gaze to the technical booth window, her eyes flooded with fear. I followed the script I always use when it is clear a patient is terrified.

‘Now I know this is all very spooky and strange. But I promise you that it will all be over in just a few minutes. OK?’

I hit the button that detonated the automatic injection system. As I did so a timer appeared on one of the screens. I turned my vision immediately to Caroline, her cheeks suddenly very red as the iodine contrast hit her bloodstream and raised her body temperature by two degrees. The scan program now kicked in, as the bed was mechanically raised upwards. Like almost every other patient Caroline shuddered. I grabbed the microphone:

‘Nothing to worry about, Caroline. Just please keep very still.’

To my immense relief she did absolutely as instructed. The bed reached a level position with the circular hoop. Twenty-eight seconds had elapsed. The bed began to shift backwards into the hoop. Thirty-six seconds when it halted, the hoop encircling her head. Forty-four seconds. Forty-six. My finger was on the scan button. I noticed it trembling. Forty-nine. And.

I hit the plunger. The scan had started. There was no accompanying noise. As always I shut my eyes, then opened them immediately as the first images appeared on the two screens in front of me, showing both mammary glands. Again I snapped my eyes shut, thinking about how her doctor would break the news to her if the growth was malignant.

But professionalism trumped fear. My eyes sprang open. And what I saw was.

A fibroadenoma. I’d seen so many of them over the years I could spot them immediately — and I’d yet to misjudge one. Without question, Caroline was harboring a fibroadenoma: a solid, round, rubbery lump that moves freely in the breast when pushed and is usually painless.

They are also benign. Always benign.

I now began to scrutinize the scan with care — my eye following every contour and hidden crevasse around the two mammary glands, like a cop scouring all corners of a crime scene, looking for some hidden piece of evidence that might change the forensic picture entirely. I searched the areolas, the nipples, the ducts, the lobules, the fat deposits, not to mention the adjoining ribs, the sternum and the surrounding muscles.

Nothing.

I went over the scan a third time, just to cover my tracks, making certain I hadn’t overlooked anything, simultaneously ensuring that the contrast was the correct level, while the imaging was of the standard that Dr Conrad required.

Nothing.

I sat back in my chair and found myself smiling. Good news. But news that I myself could not impart, though I would find Dr Conrad in a few minutes and hope that — after hearing about the patient’s pregnancy, her previous miscarriages, and her great understandable fears — she’d show the humanity I’d occasionally seen lurking behind the granitic exterior and speed through a diagnosis to Caroline’s doctor.

I peered out again at this anguished, frightened woman. My contemporary. And so much a fellow sufferer. In a moment I would reach for the microphone and tell her that the scan was over and compliment her on her bravery and brace myself for an onslaught of questions — What did you see? You’ve got to tell me, is it malignant? Is it benign? What did you see? — as soon as I walked back in to release her from the bier.

Were this my world — and it’s nobody’s world — what would I actually say, besides the fact that the lump is benign? What piece of counsel might I impart to her? Not wisdom — because one person’s wisdom is another person’s clichйs. And as there are absolutely no answers to life’s larger conundrums, it might be something as simple and blunt as this:

Amidst all the fear, the doubt, the longing, the setbacks, the hope for something better, the sense that you have boxed yourself in.

Amidst all the infernal struggles you will always have with yourself, and the realization that everything is so profoundly temporal, there is what the screen in front of me tells me: That growth within you will not kill you.

And even if, from this moment on, you continue to block yourself, disappoint yourself, lock yourself into an existence you know you don’t want, the screen still says: All clear. There is a chance now. But if, in the end, you can’t convert that chance into change, there is still one great consolation. if you choose to see it:

You’re going to live.