The One Who Got Away: A Novel (15 page)

“You’ve grown. I’ve grown. All
that means is that we know what we want now,” Henry said.  

“We do?”

“Just hear me out, Ollie. I
wasn’t ready, before now, for you. For this. But I am now. And I think you are.
And now this has been allowed to happen. And so, if you look at it that way, no
time has been wasted. We’re right where we should be.
When
we she would
be.”

“What about your wife?”

“Like I said, she is in love with
someone else. It’s over.”

“Just like that?”

“Well, no. There was nothing
instant about it. Nothing ‘just like that.’ It has been a painful time. Tremendously
painful. And she has a son. My stepson. And we’re close. So it’s complicated.
But neither of us is right for the other anymore. We both belong with…other
people. She sees that as much as I do.”

“But I just got engaged. I’m
planning my wedding.”

“Eagerly?”

“Yes, eagerly,” she lied.
“Enthusiastically and excitedly and everything else.”

And then Henry said, “I will walk
away from you, right now, if you can tell me, right now, that you feel the same
way about Paul as you do about me. If you can tell me that he makes you feel
like you have come home. If you can tell me that, when you are with him, you
feel like you have spent lifetimes together before this one. That there is an
easiness but also an energy with him that makes no sense but that is so real
that it keeps pulling you back here, whether it’s in your car or on your skis
or on your feet. There is something happening here, Olivine. To me. And I will say
no more words and I will go away right now if you can tell me that it isn’t
happening to you.”
 

As he spoke, something bright and
still coursed through her. She closed her eyes to breathe and to enjoy the silence
and the peace and the light that was taking root inside her.

When she opened her eyes again,
Henry’s head was tilted to the side, and his eyebrows were raised. He searched
her face, and his voice softened. “Let’s just slow down,” he said. “Let’s just
you and I  catch up. No pressure. Nothing weird. No speaking of past lifetimes,”
he said. “I’m sorry, I got caught in the moment. I promised myself I wouldn’t
freak you out. But I know what I know. And I think you know, too.”

Her head spun once; righted
itself. They looked at each other steadily for a long while. And then Henry
said, “So can I at least tell you why I left? I promise not to get sentimental
on you. But I have to get it out of me before I leave, Olivine, or I’ll never
forgive myself. It will be my undoing. Of that I am sure.”

She was silent.

He unscrewed the top of the Thermos
and his hands shook as he poured her another mug of tea. “Things have not been
the way I planned for them. My whole life.
This
whole life. Nothing in
my life has turned out the way it was supposed to. Ever since that day ten years
ago when we lay on the floor in that tree house. And then I went away.”

She looked down into her lap.

“I know it’s my fault, Olivine. I
know it is. And I know that it’s so unfair of me to walk in. Right now. But the
idea that you were lost to me, forever…”

“It’s not so much that you left,”
she interrupted. “It was the absoluteness of it. The finality. And the fact
that you did it with absolutely no explanation. You disappeared. You
vanished.
The last thing I remember we were there, in the dark, having what was the most
intimate experience of my entire life. It was like I tasted that, that
thing
that people die for. That look in people’s eyes who have been happily married
for years and years and years. That thing my grandparents have. I tasted that.
That
.
It was mine, for a moment. It was indescribable. And then…” She snapped her
fingers. “Gone.” She tipped her head back. “Henry, I suspected, for some time,
that you had actually died. What else would have made you leave so suddenly? But
no, you just went to Idaho. To find a wife.” She choked on the word. She took a
deep breath and sat up straighter. “If you knew everything you just said you
knew, about us, you wouldn’t have gotten married.”

“Olivine, I don’t blame you for
being angry. At least let me explain what happened.”

“I’m not angry,” she said, but
she was clenched inside, and so she opened herself up once again. She took a
deep breath, and she allowed each of the emotions to course through her, and
then she said softly, “You were the one thing I was sure about. The one thing
that was unlike anything else. I had never  wanted to get married, never wanted
to commit myself to a man, and then you came along and I couldn’t imagine taking
a breath without you. And then, gone. And now…now, I’m finally back to the
person I was when you left me. And now you’re here again. And everything is
just so...different.”

“Is it? I still feel it. Bigger,
stronger, even, than ever before.”

She sighed.

“Sorry, Olivine, but I do.”

“You don’t even know me, Henry. You
knew me for three months when I was twenty-two. I was a kid. A lot has changed.
A lot, Henry.”

“Well, I don’t think things have
changed as much as you think.”

She let silence overtake her once
again. And she appreciated how he allowed silence. He didn’t rush in. Finally,
he said, “Olivine, I’ve missed you. So much. When I saw you round the corner of
the porch that night, it was all I could do not to take you into my arms. It
just felt so right that you would just…arrive. That you would find me here. And
then to know that you are getting married. Olivine, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry
for all of it. Just let me explain.”

Olivine stood then from her
canvas chair and, without looking at him, she stretched out on the cold cedar
planks of the porch. She drank in the earthiness of the wood. She stared up at
the soffit of the porch roof, where it planed into the eave. A skiff of
restless snowflakes, dry and skittery, blew in and flitted along her face and
eyelashes. She lay her arms straight at her sides so she could feel the biting
chill on every part of her, and she focused on letting go of the anger and the
frustration and the tension she was feeling. She envisioned herself gathering
all of these feelings and clutching them hard in her palm. Forming them into a
ball, tight and round. And then she released them, all at once.

And that is when he came to lay
beside her, parallel to her. She could no longer see him, but she could feel
him just inches away. She stared up at her grandparents’ wind chimes, the same chimes
that had hung there for years, decades. She listened to their rhythmic bonging
and she watched them swing, more violently now as the clouds rolled in.

And when he began to speak, she
closed her eyes, and she let his words drift over her. She had waited so long
for them that she could almost not believe they were being said. She allowed
the cold wood beneath her to ground her, to root her to the world, to remind
her that she was alive and real and so was this moment.

And he told her.

“When I told you everything, in
the tree house, and you accepted me and my pain, and you didn’t try to discuss
it or tell me how I should be feeling, but instead, you just absorbed it. You
allowed it. When you responded to my deepest pain and guilt and shame, not with
words but by taking me inside you, into a quiet and soft place…” he said. “It
was the greatest gift anyone had ever given me. And it was one of those
moments. It was like I felt the earth shift, and I knew that my life had changed
forever. The moment would be ever etched in my mind and my life would never be
the same. Olivine, you were so accepting, so kind, so generous. After you made
love to me like that, I felt…otherworldly. Almost like I had just died. Lying
in that room. So hot. Remember how hot it was?”

“I remember.” Everything had stopped
inside her, and she listened.  

“And when I left I decided I
would take that stillness you had given me. And I would go and I would face my
mother.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were
going?”

“I planned to tell you, to call
you as soon as I saw her. But this was something I needed to do on my own. To
face her. To reconcile. No matter how angry she was at me for leaving my father
that night. And for leaving her right in the midst of her grief. I could face
her, and I could make it right. And so I was going to go and to make peace with
my mother and then I would call you. And I would tell you how it went.”

“So? Why didn’t you?”

“When I got home…” He paused and
swallowed hard. “When I got home, I found out she had died.”

Olivine went cold.

“And it had happened the night
before. During the time we were together.” He was laying flat on his back, next
to her, and now he crossed his arm over his eyes, shielding his eyes from her
face, from the skittering snow that blew sideways onto the porch. Olivine
propped herself up on one arm. All she could see was his lips, fleshy and
thick. And his bicep, white and exposed as his arm slung over to cover his
face.

“And all I could think was that I
should have been there. I should have believed her. I should have come home
earlier.”

“Oh, Henry,” she said, “How were
you to know? There’s no way you could have known.”

“But there was, Olivine. She told
me she was sick. And I didn’t believe her. I left her. In the midst of her
grief over my father. I left her.”

“You can’t blame yourself. You
didn’t know. You were dealing with your own things…your own feelings…”

“I was running away.”

Olivine was silent.

“And the shame came back on me.
Times ten. And then, once I was away from you, I was so angry with myself. So
angry and so guilty and so ashamed. And the memory of you was wrapped up in
that. I was with
you
instead of with my mother. All summer. The entire summer
I spent with you was time I should have been spending with my mother. I was so
in love with you, and I traded my time with you for my time with her, and I couldn’t
forgive myself.” He paused. “Don’t you see, Olivine? My absence was, in some way,
responsible for
both
of my parents’ deaths.” He choked on his words and
then he fell silent once again. Finally, he said, “And I think that staying
away from you was my way of punishing myself.”

“Or another means of running
away,” she said softly.

He paused. Then continued. “When
I arrived home, and I found that she was already gone, there was this woman in
her bedroom. Her nurse. The hospice nurse she had to
hire
, Olivine,
because I wasn’t there. This nurse was snapping bed sheets onto my mother’s bed
when I walked in. And she was so matter-of-fact, so filled with scorn for me. What
my mother must have told her about me.  ‘Your mother passed last night,’ was
all she said, with the iciest tone you can imagine.” He shuddered. “And as the
days went on, it destroyed me. Each day, it whittled me down, more and more. I
would think about you…so much…and you were always surrounded in this orangey
light. I couldn’t imagine you any other way, and then I stopped caring about
everything. I lost my ability to care. I saw you as this otherworldly figure
who had this kind of hold on me. One that I didn’t understand. The only
emotions I was capable of were dark and rooted in self loathing. And so I
wandered around in a kind of emotionless cloud. I didn’t deserve you. Or
anything else. I didn’t have much to say to anyone, even. I had lost the ability
to feel. And you, so full of life.”

She watched him. Watched his lips
move. Unable to find words to say, so she kept silent.

“Oh, Olivine, if you could have
seen me, I would have scared you. You never would have wanted to have anything
to do with me.”

“That’s not possible. How could
you imagine I would be so…so small? The thing I wanted most in the world was to
care for you.”

There was a silence then, deep
and long. Finally, Henry spoke. “And so some time passed.”

“Some time?”

“A year or so, by this point, Olivine.
I’m so sorry. I thought every day about coming back, here. Just to see you.
Your energy, your life, your light. I felt like I needed to come back. But then
I imagined myself just draining you, sucking the very life out of you. I dreamt
it. I dreamt that I found you and I put out your light; as soon as you saw me,
you just faded. Into nothingness. And I couldn’t do that to another person I loved.”
He shook his head. “Trust me, Olivine. It wasn’t the right time for me to come
back. To come and find you. You wouldn’t have liked the person I had become.”

“That’s ridiculous. Seriously,
this all made sense to you?”

“Oh yeah. If I had come back
then, I would have blown it all. Everything.” 

He sat up now and turned to the
side so he was leaning against the log post on the side of the porch. And he
watched her where she lay, her hands folded on her chest, fingers interlaced.
She closed her eyes, but she could feel him watching her.

“Over time, my shame began to
fade, but then came a sense of numbness. Sort of like I described to you in the
tree house, but so much more. So much deeper.” He took a deep breath, an
exhale. “That’s when I met Clara.”