Away From Everywhere (15 page)

He thought of how differently she would have reacted years ago, even months ago. How she would be in the bathroom right now, running cold water over a facecloth and calling out to him, worried that the burn would blister. He pictured how she'd scrunch up her face as she tended his wound – pursed lips and a long inhale would prove her sincere sympathy.

Now he could set himself on fire and know that she wouldn't look up from that goddamn textbook.

She had just gotten off the phone with Alex. Owen heard her asking all about the complexities of muscle contraction. He could tell from his brother's rapid-fire responses that Alex didn't even have to pause to think about the answers. He explained the roles of actin and myosin and Z-lines and calcium pumps, and her pencil scratched and hurried across the page. His brother would get her through that physiology course, and something about that placed him and Abbie in two different worlds.

Something about that made him feel like what he chose to do with his life was wrong.

He tried again, with a playful kick in his voice, “Hey, Abbie, you're pretty much a nurse now. C'mon, what do I do with a burn? Abbie?”He waved his arm in her face.

She looked up at his slightly reddened arm.“I wouldn't call
that
a burn.”

He let it go. He ignored feeling like a fly on the wall she didn't have the heart to swat. He went to get the cold facecloth himself, and when he took it away from his arm, he felt vindicated by the blister. He rushed out to the kitchen to prove her insensitive, or wrong, or something more vague and important than that.

She was flipping the steaks. “You've got them charred, Owen!”

“I burned my arm! What's your problem?” He waved a forearm at her from across the room.

“You! And don't get snotty with me! I worked nine to five today, and I have a physiology midterm tomorrow. You were off all day and you can't even make us supper? You
forgot
to go out and get garlic and mushrooms, then you
char
–”

“I was busy today too, and I'm sorry I forgot.”

“Busy what, writing?” The way her eyes rolled and her head slumped substituted all the words she kept on the tip of her tongue:
Writing doesn't count as being busy. Wake the fuck up already.

She slammed down the metal spatula. It jangled and flung steak juice across the counter and onto the sleeve of her white shirt. “I'm sorry, Owen …I… I'm sorry.”Trembling lips now, and glossy squinted eyes. “You've burned your arm and I'm yelling about the steaks, and I'm sorry for that …but we both know it's not about the steaks. And. I'm sick of pretending … about us.”

She was staring at the floor, not him. She folded her arms across her chest, and he thought of the J-shaped scar on her left breast, in the fold of her cleavage, there since the day Jim Croaker attacked her and killed his mother. Nine years into their relationship, that scar still took him back to that day. In the summer, if she wore a low-cut top, she'd smear some foundation on it to camouflage the pink. Her conscious effort to conceal the scar was what made Owen's guilt and culpability no less potent as the years went by. He thought back to how their relationship had started: two people with nothing but each other, and no need for anything else. He shot forward to how this would end: two people needing something more than they could offer each other.

He thought of the first time they made love, not even a month after his mother died. They were on Abbie's couch, and the way she kissed him vibrated through his lips, rattled down through his ribcage, and massaged him from the inside out. He was shy and awkward and a little embarrassed by the hard lump now squat between their bodies, almost painfully pressed up against the denim of his jeans. She only giggled, scissored her hands, and slid her own pants down. She took her shirt off and asked him to do the same, but he never heard her – the sight of her body had deafened him. He was all eyes and hands now, and she was the only thing on earth. He was still taking it all in as she tugged at his pants: the delicate pink folds awaiting him, the way her breasts fell away from each other, the arch of her collarbones. Even the way her bones pressed against her skin and shaped her transfixed him; the out-jutting of her hipbones and her outstretched arms made a net of her, something to fall into. She pulled him into her herself, guiding him into the welcoming warmth and wetness that dropped and hollowed his jaw. The soft clench and tug of her against him now, her seemingly endless depth, relieved his every want and need. He exhaled his every sorrow and then filled himself with the sight, sound, and smell of her.

That day was the only time he'd ever been aware of his own heart beating in his chest and the architecture of his every muscle. He kissed her, and felt some part of him leave his body, enter hers, and come back to him better than it had left him. He watched her finger rub tiny circles just above where he was inside of her, and the sight was so potent he had to look away or finish too soon.

A cloud must have shifted, and a bright beam of light burst in through the living room window. It poured itself across the floor, crept up her left leg, crawled up her smooth white belly, and illuminated her bare chest. It made the scar on her breast glisten red. It was the first time he'd ever seen it. He ran his thumb gently across it – it felt glossy against the smoothness of her skin – and his face exploded into tears. He fell into her arms and wept without explanation. He didn't have one to offer. After a few minutes, she plucked the deflated condom from his flaccid penis, threw it on the floor, and shimmied back onto the couch to better cradle him, combing his hair with her fingers and humming
shhhhh shh shh shhhh, shhhhh shh shh shhhh
.

She tore him back into the present. “It's a charade,Owen, a lie. We are lying to ourselves now … and that is tainting this beautiful thing we had. It's just. Every day of this takes away another memory of how it was.”

She looked up from the floor and met his eyes. “I don't want to come out of this relationship with more bad memories than good, and I want to think fondly of you,Owen. You know I'm right, right? This has to turn itself around or end.”

At this point, neither of them cared enough for another argument or conversation about
it/that/us
. They had spent eight and a half years together in utter bliss, and then another half year pretending, faking bliss, clinging to what was, and ignoring the inevitable signs of their demise. They were going to bed at different times and only selectively listening to the details of each other's days, and they seemed cold and indifferent to each other when one of them burned an arm on a hot pan or had a bad flu. Their problems were redundant now, and the fighting seemed habitual and unproductive, yet they loved each other enough to be crushed by knowing they were drifting apart. Residual love and a plethora of fond memories made a mess of them: they were a composite of yesterdays too intricately woven to be pulled apart.

She stormed off to their bedroom and slammed the door shut behind her. Although Owen never knew what it was he was doing wrong, it still pained him to hear her in tears behind a closed door. It was a heartache he felt in his throat and teeth, like a dry cry. She wept so wildly at times that she hyperventilated, and one night he heard her throw up, violently, as if she were throwing up her heart. She was precious, too precious for tears, and every sob she wept hacked into Owen. Blows from a rusted axe. She said it was his lack of presence in their relationship that got to her, but he didn't know how to make himself more
there
.

He stood on the other side of the door and listened to her haul a dresser drawer open, as she always did. She'd always dig out a small scrap of paper Owen had given her when they first met, some prose on how much she'd meant to him. She'd throw it in his face like it was a lie, like he'd deceived her, on purpose. Like he never once meant those words.
Youmademe feel invincible,Owen…and perfect for someone…You made me believe in, in
you…and us…and ….

The only difference on this night was that he could hear her tearing the note into a thousand little squares, and the sound of it felt like she had scissors shredding their way through his heart. Each rip was so definite and final and symbolic of her commitment to move on and find what he was denying her.

He grabbed the door handle.

“
Don't
, Owen!” She grabbed the handle on the other side of the door and pressed all her weight against it. He heard her nails click off the hollow wood of the door, and he placed his hand where he imagined hers to be. Her fingers still killed him: so thin and feminine they bent at each knuckle.

“Just …leave me alone, okay? Just …go …for now.”

He walked back out to the living room and threw himself down into the computer chair. It slid a few feet, and the wheels against hardwood rolled like thunder. For weeks now, he'd exhausted himself trying to pinpoint why they were falling apart, how something once so flawless was now nothing but flawed. He wheeled himself back over to the computer and flicked the mouse to turn off the screensaver: a slideshow of photos on their computer, years literally flashing before him. What he saw was a photo of them on a three-day hike in Gros Morne National Park, running away from everything in the world but each other. Her with a thin, bright blue scarf wrapped around her head like a veil to keep the insects out, him the same, in an extra scarf she had. A pink one.
Any chance we can swap colours?
She giggled and shook her head.
You look too cute in pink.

There was nothing that day but the crunch of detritus beneath their feet and immaculate, unspoiled scenery. They hadn't seen another person in forty-eight hours. There was something about seeing her all rugged there ahead of him on the trail, ravaged by the elements – frizzy hair and a sunburned face – and still trucking through the trees with an oversized backpack hiding everything but her legs. A frying pan, tied on to her pack, slapped gently off the backs of her thighs with every step, except when she'd turn around and smile at him, maybe every tenth step, just checking that he was still there. A smile and a look that meant she needed him to be there.

He wanted to run down the hall and ask Abbie if she remembered that trip – how he'd convinced her to take a
roll in the wildflowers
with him that day, and they laid a blanket down, and when they took it up off the ground forty-five minutes later there were three colourful butterflies squat dead beneath it and she was mortified. But he stayed in the chair, he stayed away like she'd asked. He opened his computer, because writing was the only way he knew how to process his thoughts. To write them out and see them for what they were:

write them out and see them for what they were:
How, and why, has love taken what it was supposed to give us? The fire is still there between us, endless beautiful memories make it flicker, but with no wood left, no fuel, what keeps fire alive? With no hope for the future, what keeps love alive? Memories aren't enough.

I love the Jason Molina lines:

“We are proof

That the heart

Is a risky fuel to burn.

What's left after that's all gone

I hope to never learn.

But if you stick with me

You can help me

I'm sure we'll find new things to burn.

Because we are proof, that the heart, is a risky fuel
to burn.”

What is left when it's all gone? What is left of me now?

Madly in love with Abbie Darenberg, I let myself believe nothing else mattered. There was nothing on earth worthwhile but her, and us, wrapped up on the
couch watching a movie. And now, free-falling out of love, suddenly everything matters. Painfully. The job I don't have, the degrees I never finished, the family we'll never have. If she was everything to me, what is there without her?

Take the bones from a body and watch it fall useless to the floor. I put her where my bones once were, in my veins and arteries as my blood. Life happens so slowly that we never feel ourselves changing until we've changed so much we cannot recognize who we once were. It's all there in that picture of course, us in pink and blue scarves and alone in the world, but those two people, that moment, it's all dead and gone and alive only in a photo – a deceitful piece of glossy paper.

I won't know myself without her. I will have shattered who I could have been in being with her. I want nothing but who she was, when I was who I was. How does time spill in between two people like that? Put a stream, and then an ocean between them?

Abbie was thirty-one, and their age difference was rearing its hideous face. She was envisioning a future and Owen was revealing himself as more of an obstacle than a part of that future. When she saw a cute little girl in a coffee shop now, or watched a proud new mother pushing a carriage, she thought of having her own children. He knew it in the way she clutched his arm, smiled, and nodded at the child.