The One Who Got Away: A Novel (16 page)

“Your wife.”

“My wife.”

Olivine opened her eyes and
looked to him. He squared his shoulders and held her gaze. “Clara had all the
emotions for me. She let me hide. She let me hide behind her and her emotions,
which…” he laughed and said, “are larger than life. She made things easy
because she took over. And at the time I didn’t care. She told me how I was
feeling and she told other people how I was feeling. And that’s exactly what I
needed then. As unhealthy as it probably was.”

“And that’s not what you need
now?”  

“No. Clara and I…We don’t need
one another in the same way. She loves me, but she doesn’t
know
me. She
is so full of
her
life that she couldn’t ever let mine in, once I began
to heal. Not even enough to listen to what I want and need now.” His voice
became suddenly quiet. “I have a wife who doesn’t know the real me…who doesn’t
accept him. And then there is you. Who accepted me even at my worst. My most
shameful.”

The wind chimes gonged, and she
took a moment to take in his words. To allow them to cast new light on the
things she knew to be true. 

“How long have you been married,
then?”

“Eight years.”

“Eight
years
?”  

“Yes, Olivine, and now I… I have
forgiven myself. I have healed. And now I find that I resent her for telling me
who am I and what I feel. More than you can imagine. But she can’t change. She
has proven that. We have worked on it and worked on it. And, honestly, she has
moved on. She has fallen in love with another man whom she can tell where to
work and what to do. Do you see? This is what I needed, once. So I could hide. But
it’s not what I need now.”

“So were you ever happy with her?
With Clara.” She forced herself to say his wife’s name.  

“For a time I was. Or maybe just
content. I was content to be numb. Clara helped me in a way that no one else
could at the time. And, for that, I’ll always love her. But it was the very
fact that I felt so detached from her…that’s what made it work. I never felt a sense
of responsibility. She didn’t judge my emotions but she also never asked me to
explain myself. She never asked me how I felt about certain things.” He put his
hand to his head, rubbed his scalp, and then slid his hand down to the back of
his neck. Again, his bicep exposed, white. Blue veins running up and down.

“But you,” Henry continued, “you don’t
have to ask because you know. When I’m with you, I feel like I have met myself.
A reflection of me. A part of me. It’s something I can’t explain and something
I have spent ten years trying to tell myself I had made up. Something that
naïve part of me had concocted. But I hadn’t. It’s stronger than ever. I felt
it as soon as I saw you. The other night, at the house.” Henry looked her
straight in the eyes. “It was my own cowardice that ruined things, Olivine. But
I’m not a coward anymore.”

“So why did you marry her?
Marriage is…marriage. I mean, before you said, ‘I do,’ why didn’t you come to
find me?”  

“I thought I had made you up. The
intensity of the emotion. I had convinced myself of this. And there was this
thing in front of me, which made perfect sense, logically, at least. Me, a carpenter;
a builder of homes. She, an architect. She taking charge and helping me to not
feel. To just go along. I was in hiding, in many ways, from myself.” He took a
deep breath and continued. “When you are suffering and someone comes along and
witnesses you, in this wide, wide world where you feel like you are just
floating from place to place, and this person helps you to just establish a
point of contact, a focal point so you don’t get so dizzy as you spin out of
control. This, she taught me, is what a family can do. And, at certain times, this
is all you need. And as time went on, it felt more and more unfair to come and
find you.” He paused. “But that’s not all of it. That’s not the reason we
married…Clara has a son. From a previous relationship. And it’s a son I love
very much. And she wouldn’t allow me to spend time with her, on a serious
level, without marriage. She didn’t want me to be with her and with Max as a
family without committing to them. She didn’t want me to be the guy who just
sleeps over.”

Olivine’s breath caught, and she
swallowed hard.

And then he spoke again: “To be
fair, Olivine, you never came to find me, either.”

“No, you’re right. I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well, first, it doesn’t sound
like it would have made a difference.”

“But that doesn’t change the fact
that you didn’t do it.
You
didn’t try either, Olivine. Never in those
ten years did you look for me. You could have found me. You knew my home town.
My first and last name.”

“Do you know what?” she said, “I
felt rejected. Tossed out. I guess I was insecure. Too insecure to chase you.
Though, honestly, my sister told me, for a couple of years there, that I needed
to go and find you.”  

“And it was insecurity that
stopped you, even after a couple of years had passed?”

“Insecurity and pride.” The word
came out, without her thinking about it. “I was so devastated when you left,
but you had rejected me. I vowed long ago never to be one of those pining women
who throw their lives away for a man. Who sit there and watch and wait for a
man to come home. So I swept you out of my mind. I went on. I decided that you
were not what you said you were. I decided you had fooled me, and then I
dismissed you from my thoughts.”

“Just like that?”

“On the surface, yes. Deep down,
I thought about you every day, along with a dose of self-flagellation regarding
the fact that I
was
, in fact, pining for a man who could allow me to
make love to him, and then – the next morning – after sharing something so
intimate, to the point that it shook me to my core; made me believe in love; made
me understand what people mean when they say they entered into another
person…The next morning, he left. That person left me.” Olivine paused. “I was
too proud to pine for you. So I protected my heart a bit more. In fact, I
credit you for helping me to develop this rather remarkable ability to turn off
my emotions…or to shove them deep inside.”

He nodded. “And now?” he asked.

“Now I know nothing.”

“Yes, you do.” He smiled at her.

“I know.”

They sat for a moment, still, and
listened to the wind in the trees.

“So you can turn off your
emotions?” he said, after a time.

“I can. Actually, it would be
more accurate to say that I have these emotions, or little ambitions for
myself, and I can go along and never tell anyone. Over time, I can convince
even myself that they aren’t there.”

“Doesn’t this drive a wedge
between you and other people?”

“Oh, most definitely.” She
laughed.

“With Paul?” 

Hearing Paul’s name coming from
Henry’s mouth felt strange. “I’m not sure Paul cares. He doesn’t care enough to
dig, if that makes sense.” And she knew, as soon as she said it, that this
wasn’t fair. She had never expected Paul to dig. She had never wanted Paul to
dig. “Paul knows what Paul wants,” Olivine explained. “And Paul knows what Paul
wants for me. And that, I’m coming to understand, is the end of it.” She paused
for a moment. “Sometimes I feel like I have a little garden patch, deep inside
myself, which is my very own. I plant just one thing at a time in there…only
things that are very, very important to me. But If I let people in there, I
find that they trample things. They make fun of something or pull something up
by the roots or they walk right over the top and don’t realize what they are
doing. And so I learned to put a tiny fence around it.” She laughed softly to
herself. “At first, I was concerned that people would be curious about what was
in there, deep inside. About what I was hiding, but I soon came to discover
that no one cares that much. They don’t care that you have a little fence, or a
special little garden. So you really don’t have to tell anyone what you are
planting.”

“I think I know what you mean,”
Henry said. “At some point, you realize that no one would listen anyway, if you
were to tell them all about what was going on in there, and so you keep it
inside. It becomes yours, and no one else’s, and at that point, it is safe. You
become the hero, the owner of that tiny patch, that tiny garden, in that tiny
fence.”

“Exactly.” Olivine sat up now,
one leg bent, her arm resting on her knee.

And then Henry said, “But what if
you found someone who
did
care? Who not only cared about
what
you
were growing, but also understood that you didn’t care to show it off. Someone
who waited patiently outside until you decided that you wanted to let him in? Someone
who would listen when you said you were ready to show what you were planting.
Someone who would understand if you said you would like him to stay outside
that day. Someone who understood what it was like to need to keep people out
from time to time. And someone who would let you in, too, when the time was
right? Someone who cared, but also who didn’t barge in and trample.”

She smiled as a response, but she
couldn’t look at him, because she wanted, more than anything, to move her face
toward his, to feel his lips press against her own, to feel the warmth of his
body against hers.

“That’s who you are to me,
Olivine. In my memory. You accept me. You acknowledge and believe the goodness
in me. And I want to do the same for you.”

Olivine’s heart swelled, and
Henry continued: “I think these fenced-in spaces you talk about…I think they
are vital to the world. In fact, I think that they just may be responsible for
all the art that exists…everywhere. Someone—an artist—goes inside, really deep
down in there, and they look around and it’s bleating red and pounding in
there. And they emerge with something and it's a little bit of them, fleshy and
round. Something that no one else could really be privy to.”

“Yes!” She startled herself with
the volume of her own voice. “That's why it's always so surprising to me when
people can collaborate. When people go into a room together and write a book or
a play. That's a level of intimacy that I could never grant someone. It's total
access. Or else the art isn't very good.”

“Maybe it’s that level of
intimacy that some of us just aren’t meant to grant,” Henry replied. “There are
certain private places I would never ask to see, Olivine. But, if you were to
grant me a tour, I would accept you and love you, no matter what was inside.”

They looked at one another
steadily for a moment. Olivine could feel her face, her mouth, her lips moving
in toward him as they sat on the cedar planks. She dropped her gaze. Henry
continued, softly: “When I build my doors… when I etch and carve, I go in there.
I go in there where it’s fleshy and round and red. Sometimes I need to stay in
there.” He paused. “Clara could never accept that. She wanted to come in with
me, and it ruined the art. Or, at least,” he said, laughing, “it ruined the
fun. It ruined what made the art, the art.”  

“And you can’t
not
make
the art.”

“It doesn’t make sense, but when
I’m not making things out of wood, I get panicky,” Henry said. “It hasn’t
always been like this, but, lately, since I’ve discovered the importance of
this simple thing, the power of going inside myself in this simple way, I feel
like I’m wasting my life or I’m not being productive enough when I do anything
else. I felt that way when I was building houses with Clara. Huge things were
getting done each day. Together, we were churning out two ten-thousand square
foot luxury homes every year. We had incredible success. We worked twenty-hour
days, sometimes. But I still felt panicky. Like I wasn’t doing enough. “

“Like you weren’t sucking the
juice out of life.”

“Exactly. And then when I stopped
all that and I slowed way down and I started doing carpentry again. Real
carpentry with old fashioned tools…Not the ones you can plug in, not the ones that
whine and buzz, but the ones that make curls of wood on the floor and release
the scent of cedar as I work…”

“The ones you pull from an old
black tin…” Olivine said, thinking of her grandfather.

“Exactly! And when I get into a rhythm
of my own, then I never think about it. I never worry that I have wasted an
afternoon, though my productivity is a fraction of what it was. A tiny, tiny
fraction.”  

She sat cross-legged and leaned
forward, resting her elbows on her knees.  “I’ve been feeling like that lately,
Henry. It’s throat-clutching. It wakes me in the night. It’s a worry that I’m
wasting my life. And I try to fill every moment with something. Still, I worry
that life is passing me by, that I’m wasting the little bit of time that I have
on this earth. I’m too young for a mid-life crisis—I know that, but it’s very
real—and I think I solved this by deciding I needed to get married. That maybe
it was this instinctual urge to have babies. To procreate.”

“That’s one way,” he said, “But it’s
not the only way. I think you have to start by writing again. When was the last
time you wrote?”

“Up until I started my nursing classes,
I was writing every day.”