Two Time

TWENTY-NINE

IT WAS STILL DARK when I woke up and decided to take a run. I left Amanda sleeping and crept out on the front lawn carrying my running shoes, shorts and T-shirt. Eddie heard me and came out to see what was up. He yawned, stretching his front paws forward and sticking his butt in the air. I hadn’t looked at the clock on my way out, but it was probably a little after five judging by the faint glow forming along the eastern horizon.

I took my northern route that started behind Amanda’s house and followed the shore of the Oak Point Lagoon, on which launches, fishing boats and shoal draft sailboats drifted languorously in the calm water at the end of bulky mooring lines.

I wasn’t looking to make a big run of it. I just wanted to get as far as a sandy bluff I knew where a chunk of glacial rock stuck out partway down the hill, giving you a good place to sit and watch the sun slowly light up the bay as it rose over your left shoulder.

Eddie was always a little iffy about the whole thing, reluctant to make the short slide from the edge of the bluff down to the outcrop of stone, but he always did it anyway. And always landed where he was supposed to, though a clean miss would have been far from fatal. Might even like it. Climb back up the hill and do it again.

I just needed a place to think. Where distractions were at a minimum. Where you could do little but brood and brace yourself against an unplanned tumble down the sandbank to the bay shore. When I had a job troubleshooting engineered systems I picked out a few of these places within a short driving distance from the office in White Plains. Parks, coffee shops, bars, congenial habitats where you could be anonymous and unmolested for a brief period, enough to sketch out an answer to a puzzle on a yellow legal pad, or simply tick through all the points of contention.

I took it as a matter of faith that any problem could be solved eventually if you only put the right amount of thought into it, if you only had the time and mental capacity to focus on a solution. I was wrong about that. Startlingly wrong, but I didn’t know that then.

Like most serious joggers, I brought a pack of cigarettes along with me to assist in the focusing process. I lit one and leaned up against the sandbank. I missed the adjoining cup of coffee, but there’s only so much you can haul in a pair of nylon jogging shorts.

I slid further down the bank until I could look up at the blue sky emerging from the silver-gray of early morning. I waited for enlightenment to drift effortlessly into my mind, but all that happened was the urge to go back to sleep. I don’t know what I thought I should be thinking about, only that there was an unresolved issue floating freely somewhere inside my consciousness, one that had been obscured by the clamorous thoughts of the last few weeks, and was now asserting itself.

I waited for more inspiration until the sun had the Little Peconic bathed in a pale new light and Eddie, uncharacteristically, began to whine with impatience.

“All right, all right,” I said to him, carrying him back up the sandbank and dropping him down on the trail so we could jog back. I took an extended route, though it was still early when I got back to the cottage to find Amanda, wrapped in a blanket, out in the Adirondacks drinking coffee. I swung by my kitchen to pour a cup for myself and joined her.

“You must be tired,” she said. “You didn’t get much sleep.”

“Sometimes tiredness will do that to you.”

We sat quietly for a while, sipping the coffee and watching big seabirds skim along barely a foot above the still water, searching for breakfast.

“I’m moving out in a few days,” said Amanda.

“Really.”

“I’m thinking I might even leave the area. I’ve been here for a long time. And now I can be anywhere I want.”

“That’s true.”

Another silence settled in for a while. As I cooled down from the run I realized the air was not as warm as it had been, and drier, so you could easily see the houses on Nassau Point across the bay. Yet the winds were calm. That wasn’t a typical combination, and I wondered what it meant.

“How come?” I asked.

“How come what?”

“You want to leave?”

“I’m not sure it’s what I want. I just don’t want to go through it again.”

“Through what?”

She’d been looking out at the bay the whole time, but now she rolled up on her shoulder so she could look at me.

“Now that there’s nothing forcing you into the world, you’ll head back into hibernation. That’s where you’d prefer to be. Alone with yourself. You did it before, you’ll do it again.”

“I had a reason.”

“What, because I damaged you? You thought no more damage was possible, and just like that, it happened anyway.”

I thought about that.

“It’s more than that.”

She didn’t say anything, waiting for me.

“You hate this, don’t you?” she said, finally.

“I hate the fact that there’s something I’m suppose to say that will cause you to change your mind, but I’m not sure what it is.”

“You would if you truly wanted me to change my mind,” she said, rolling back in the chair so she could refocus on the bay.

This was exactly the thing I was trying to noodle out that morning by running over to the rock stuck in the sandbank. It was what I first started to contemplate that day in the lumberyard during my discussion with Ike and Connie. It had something to do with the awful possibility that first choosing to live, and then choosing to live among people, exposed you to more than the danger you’d actually become attached to some of them.

If you weren’t careful, you might even start to love somebody. Worse than that, you could love somebody you’d never be able to trust. Not completely. Not ever. No amount of denial, repression or avoidance would ever change that.

Amanda started to get up from her chair.

“If I tell you I love you will you sit back down?” I asked.

She sat back down.

“Yes.”

“Good. Now try to stay put while I get some more coffee.”