The One Who Got Away: A Novel (8 page)

She made him lie still, but his
hips writhed, and she pushed against him. She took him inside her and she began
to make love to him, softly, gently and only then did she allow him to hold
her, to place his rough, warm hands on her waist, as he pushed deeper inside her.

And when they came together, when
they both cried out, it was a moment of such intimacy, such wholeness, such
oneness that it eclipsed anything she had ever felt before. It was the first
time she had taken control of a man. She had let him know, without words, that
she could care for him. That she could draw him inside her, and he would be
always accepted, always forgiven. Always enough.

It was the last she had seen of
him.

After she had made love to him,
there had been no more words. They lay together for a half hour or so and then
Henry drifted off to sleep and she woke him with a soft kiss goodnight, and she
whispered that she would walk herself home. She needed the darkness and the
time alone.

He hadn’t called the next morning
as he always did. And so she stopped by Carter’s house, a bit before noon. And Carter
had said that Henry had left that morning, and, no, he didn’t know when Henry
would be back, but would she like to go out to lunch with him? To talk about
it? She did not.  

Should she have said something
more to Henry? Done something more? Demonstrated more?

And now, she sat opposite him on
the porch of her family’s cabin, and ten years had passed, and she watched
Henry speak with Paul and she watched the care Henry was taking to avoid
looking at her. And he was a married man now. And she knew that Henry had left
her that night, and he had found someone who had done something more. Said
something more. He had found someone who had been able to comfort him and care
for him in a way that she had not. 

Just as Yarrow said, Olivine
hadn’t done enough. She hadn’t been enough. And now it was too late.

*****

“Well,” Paul said, finally. “I
suppose it’s time for us to be on our way.” And Henry nodded goodbye and
reached up and grabbed the back of his neck with his palm, exposing his bicep. It’s
what he had always done when he felt unsure, unsteady. It astonished Olivine
that his mannerisms were still so familiar. That so little about him had
changed.

Paul took Olivine’s hand as they
descended the porch steps, and he steadied her as they tiptoed their way across
the ice. And now they stood on the pebbly snow between their two cars.

“I’ll see you at home,” she said.

“You go first,” Paul replied.
“I’ll follow you out.” He looked up at the porch, where Henry was standing,
pressing his palms now against the wood and looking out into the driveway.

“Sure.” She slid into the Jeep
and turned toward home. And he stayed near to her, his headlights beaming into
her rear view mirror. She parked in her designated place in the garage and
waited for Paul to do the same. She had just opened her car door when Paul
asked, “So, how do you know this guy?”

“Just like he said. He came out
one summer to build custom homes, a long time ago, and I met him then.”

“He was your boyfriend. Wasn't
he?”

She paused and stepped out of the
car. Paul was standing at the door to the house now, watching her.

“Yes. I guess you could say that.”
Her voice was calm, quiet.

“I knew it. I could tell by the
way he was looking at you.”

She stood behind him and waited
for him to open the door; to enter the house. He held the door open for her. “So,”
he continued, “what happened?”  

“Honestly? I don’t know. He
vanished. One day. And I never talked to him again. Until today.”

“That’s strange.”

“Yeah. Kind of.” Olivine removed
her jacket and hung it on its hook in the mud room, happy to be facing away
from Paul for a moment.

“So how long did you go out? I
mean, he must have been important to you and your family at some point. Your grandfather
still talks to him.”

“I was surprised to know that,
too,” she said, walking into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator and removing
a bottle of seltzer water.

“Well, why do you think Grandpa
called him? Did he know you two dated?”

“Yeah, I think he did,” she said,
holding his gaze. “Look. It’s just a carpenter thing. They really bonded over
the building of things back then. And I think Grandpa found him online or
something. Because he wanted someone to build the door. That’s what Yarrow told
me, anyway.”

“So Yarrow knows he’s here, too?”

Olivine nodded. She took a sip of
her drink and offered it to Paul.

He shook his head. “You guys have
already discussed this?”  

“Yeah, I guess we have.”

“So you knew he was here?”

“No, but I guess I did know he
would be coming. At some point.”

“Why didn’t you mention it?”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Is that why you went out there
tonight? To the house?”  

“No. I went out to think. It’s
always a quiet place. I went out there to study my Anatomy, actually,” she lied.
“I didn’t know he had already started on his…whatever it is he is doing. And,
trust me, I’ll leave him to do it.”

He turned his eyes toward her.  

“Trust me,” she said.

“I do, Ollie.”

“I know you do. We’re getting
married, after all.” She walked over to him and popped on her toes to kiss his
cheek.

“Well.” He gave her a lopsided
smile. “I just need to know what I’m going to be dealing with for the rest of
my life. I mean, if this guy’s going to appear every now and again to try and
steal you away…” He let out a shallow laugh. “It caught me off guard, if you
want to know the truth. How could I not have known about this guy, who is very
clearly still in love with you? And then to discover that your grandfather is
trying to reintroduce you. I mean, we’ve been dating for three years.
Three
years.
How come you never mentioned this guy?”

“I don’t know. I guess because
he’s not important to me.”

“He wants you, Olivine.”

“He does not. Didn’t you hear
him? He has a wife. He has a family.”  

“So? That doesn’t matter to every
kind of guy, Olivine. Were you
looking
at him? A guy can tell these
things. He wants you.”

“You’re imagining things, Paul. If
you want the whole story, here it is. He came out here to work, when we were
both fresh out of college. We dated for, maybe, two months. He was at a
vulnerable time in his life because his father had just died. We shared a few
beers, a couple of hikes, a few bike rides. Then we both went on with our lives.
I never heard from him again, in fact. After that day. Until now. Just now. An
hour ago.”  

“So this wasn’t even a significant
relationship in your life?”

“Nope.”

“Well, if you dated at this, as
you say,
vulnerable
time in his life, it was a significant relationship for
him
. Just by virtue of the timing.”

“Maybe. If so, he never let on to
that. Maybe that explains why he looks at me like that. Maybe he just remembers
that I was once his friend during a hard time.”

“Probably. Okay. I’ll take you at
your word. But really, Olivine,” he laughed, “how many more men like this am I
going to meet?” He looked at her sideways, his grin spreading across his face.
“Do you leave a trail of heartbroken men? A wake of pining guys? Is this to be
my fate as well? Am I one of many?”

“Well, I am pretty hot,” she said,
grinning.  

“Indeed you are.”

She winced a bit, just as she did
whenever he used that word.
Indeed.
So pretentious. So affected.

“And we’re engaged,” he said. “And
I love you. And I need you. You know that, don’t you? We have a lot of big,
important plans together. Big, important things to do with our lives.”

She looked down at her hand, where
her ring should have been. “I love you, too.”

*****

Later that night, Olivine
burrowed into her down comforter and kicked a leg across the cottony expanse of
her sheets. Her mind was racing, and she tried to ground herself by consciously
feeling each place where her body met the bed. Paul snored softly beside her.

Henry’s lips. When she closed her
eyes, she could remember exactly the way it felt to kiss them. She rolled onto
her side to face Paul, but he was lying on his side, as well, and facing away
from her. His body was bare, except for the white cotton sheet tucked around
his middle. His shoulders were broad and muscular, tapering just the slightest
bit to his waist. He was strong and capable and able to handle anything with
rational, composed thought. Olivine smiled as she thought about how Paul could
handle even the toughest relationship issues in the short distance of a car
ride. In fact, each of the monumental events of their relationship had happened
in the car. On his way to get somewhere. On
their
way to get somewhere.

Paul’s breathing was calm and
measured—even in sleep. She was lucky to have found a man who loved her and her
alone. Who knew how to talk to her calmly, how to soothe her with his words,
how to fix people, how to fix anything. A man who could detach from personal
problems and live an important life. To do what needed to be done. Paul had
many things to show her and he would give her a good life, a solid life, a
secure life.

And then her thoughts turned to
Henry. To a moment a week or so before he had left. They had been sitting in
her car, an older model Jeep than the one she drove now, and he had kissed her,
and then she was sitting astride him, on the passenger’s seat and he had told
her she was the most amazing thing he had ever laid eyes on and then she kissed
his lips, his cheekbones, his forehead, his neck, and each earlobe, kissing all
the way down his neck and then to his lips once more. He began to laugh and he
pointed at the windshield and she turned to see that all the glass in the car
had fogged up so completely they couldn’t see out, and they giggled together and
he leaned over, and with his index finger, he wrote, “Henry loves Olivine” in
the steam on the windshield. Giant letters that covered the entire view.

And then—after he had
disappeared, after he had left her—on any cold or wet morning, when she would
need to use the defroster, Henry’s words would appear again. A phantom message
reminding her of a time that had once been, but was no longer.  

Olivine fell asleep, finally, to
the sounds of Paul’s hushed and gentle breathing, and she dreamt that she was
in a room with shiny white walls and royal blue trim and Henry was lying on the
bottom bunk of a three story bed. One hand was propped behind his ear and he
was grinning at her.

“Don’t worry,” he kept saying,
“We have time. We have all the time in the world. If not in this life, then in
another.” And in the dream, as he said these words, a weight lifted from her
and a sense of freedom, open and tickling, rolled through her. His lolling gaze
melted over her where she stood and she felt like she had turned to water, and
she was overflowing from her arms, her legs, the top of her head.

And in the dream, Henry sat up on
the bed and his gaze was smoldering but playful, and he pulled her to him by
the belt loops, which made her stomach drop. And then, he still on the bed and
she standing, he kissed her and she experienced the feeling of fullness, a soft
and velvety fullness. It left the faint taste of raspberries in her mouth.

All the next day, Olivine had
this feeling like she couldn’t quite catch her breath, like something was stuck
in her throat. A throbbing dullness. A nagging paltriness that lined the
deepest part of her.

And so, after doing her best on
two exams, she drove to her favorite trailhead, high enough in the backcountry
that she could still ski, even in early May. It was two miles from the college and
in the same valley as the cabin, but along the mountainside where the snow
cover was complete. Here, she knew, the trail would be shaded enough that the snow
would be soft; not crusty like on the trails below.

The parking lot here at the
trailhead was empty, just as she liked it. The world was so quiet, so still,
that every motion and sound seemed magnified and filled her with a sense of
reverence. The murmur of her breath. The rasp of her jacket as she prepared to
ski.

Olivine stood beside her car to
stretch. She sank deep into a lunge, and then she lifted her arms in the air
and breathed and then she bent forward at the waist, feeling a tug and a warmth
in her back and in her hamstrings.

And then she opened the back of
the Jeep and took out her ski boots. When she had both boots on, and the laces
were pulled tight, she gripped her skis, which extended from the center console,
high into the back hatch, and she removed them as a pair, in one sweeping
motion, and she placed them parallel near her feet on the ground. She clicked
her boots into the skis and pulled her poles from the car.

She checked the position of the
sun in the sky. She knew she would have only a short time to ski before sunset,
so she stuffed a headlamp into her jacket pocket and pulled a thin wool
stocking cap over her head before swinging the hatch closed.

Olivine made her way across the
snow-packed parking lot and over the hump of snow at the base of the trail, and
she began to kick and glide across the squeaky snow. The swoosh of her skis and
the puffs of her breath combined into a syncopated rhythm, which came faster
and faster as she climbed. It wasn’t long before a sense of contentment and
peace descended upon her, as it always did, when she skied through the trees.
Being out here was like hitting her “reset button.” It helped her to think and
to clear the cobwebs and the fuzziness from her mind.

It reminded her of when she was
writing—back when she had been writing—when she reached that state of supreme
quietness and moment-to-moment thinking. That lovely flurry of activity and
movement combined with a calm, peaceful focus. A focus she found only in
moments of deep love and deep exertion.

She had tried to take Paul along
on a backcountry ski trip once, but he preferred the chairlifts and the
predictable routes and runs of the ski resort. And that was okay. She adored
being out here alone, and she loved skiing up mountains just as much as she
loved skiing down them. Kicking and gliding up a steep ascent, she could push
her body to its limits—hamstrings, glutes, quads, triceps—all engaged to propel
her toward the summit.

She loved this trail, in
particular, because it started with a climb. Straight up. And then it would
spit her out, lightheaded and happy, on top of the world where she would be
able to see everything. On all sides.

The sun had just dipped below the
peaks, and she skied along in the near darkness, not yet ready to spoil the
wilderness with an artificial puddle of light from her headlamp. And, once she
got going, Olivine’s mind began to churn as it always did when she skied, one
thought after another: linear, clear and sharp.

And she found herself thinking
back to the day when she and Henry had been driving along in his Volkswagen and
Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” had crackled through the speakers:
“Hey lady,” the song began, “You got the love I need.” And Henry had said, “This
song makes me think of you. It’s simple. It’s lovely.”
This
was how she
felt when she was with him. Simple and lovely. Genuine and whole. Hushed, like
when the house was empty and she heard her own footsteps clacking on the wood
floors and her own breath echoing in her head and she settled down on her
favorite chair and she felt herself—her soul, her mind—inhabiting her body. And
this would lead to a surge of total awareness, and she would wonder for a
moment if anyone had the right to be this peaceful, this happy. There was a reverence
to this feeling, a slight buzz and a dizziness to it, like she was just coming
out of anesthetic, and there was a sense of fullness and of peace. This was how
she had felt with Henry.

But she wasn’t supposed to be
thinking about Henry. Only Paul. And she continued to climb, and her hamstrings
and her triceps throbbed, and her breath quickened, expelling from her now in bursts
and her thoughts continued their forward march. Memories from a decade ago right
alongside those from yesterday.

What did she need to do to stop
thinking about Henry? Henry was married. And she was engaged. To a man who
could not only take care of her forevermore but who would help her find her
purpose in life. Who wouldn’t stop until he had helped her to craft a
meaningful existence for herself.

She remembered then something
Yarrow had told her once, just after the twins were born. “There’s something
people don’t tell you about adulthood,” Yarrow had said, “probably because they
don’t want to make you too scared to go on. They don’t tell you that, half the
time, you don’t know what in the world you are doing. I mean, I had a full week
of mandatory training to be a waitress at Shoney’s, but these nurses, they just
handed me two babies. Newborns. Just like that. And now, I feel like I’m
playing house. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, which makes me wonder:
Does anyone know what the hell they’re doing?”

And Olivine had nodded her head,
adding, “I certainly don’t,” and even then, she had been thinking about Henry
and the way she felt a little lost. And she had continued sharing her fears and
her anxieties with her sister because it always helped. At least a little bit.
Olivine had said, then, “When you're a child and even a young adult, you go
along and you get good grades and you go to college and then you get a job that
is sort of like something you could have gotten
without
going to college.
And unless you're an engineer or a doctor, you flounder around and you try to
see what others are doing. You try to see how others are managing, and you try
to do whatever you were put here to do. And then one day you hear statistics
that say more than one hundred people die every minute but each lived a
meaningful and, in some respect, rich life. But no one is just a tally mark in
a statistics book. Each of these tallies lived and dreamed and puked and pooped
and had their heart broken and grew vegetables and cried and loved and
scratched. And it just gives you a different perspective on everything. That
vastness of the world…” and she and Yarrow had swayed their heads and shrugged
and looked at one another with bewilderment. This was back when Yarrow had time
to be existential, Olivine thought with a smile.

This conversation had occurred
five years ago, and, yet, here she was. Without Paul, she would be no closer to
determining how she would make her mark on the world. And then she thought,
that in the amount of time it took her to have these thoughts, in the amount of
time it took her to climb one hundred yards, several hundred more people on the
earth had perished. People just like her. And so, did it really matter? For all
of her scratching about and trying to change the world and do something
meaningful? She chuckled at herself; at the places that her mind went when she
skied.

And so she skied faster, faster
though the trees. Just ahead, the trail dipped low and then it climbed still
steeper, and she had to dig in hard with her poles for traction and her triceps
burned, and she remembered just then how she had once told Paul about wanting
to travel around and write and be a vagabond for awhile.

“Doesn’t that sound like a dream?”
she had asked.

“No,” he had replied.

“Oh.”

“I mean, why travel if you don’t
have the money to enjoy it? It would be far better to get a good career… one
that means something to you and to the world, and then, when the time is right,
you’ll have money and vacation time. If you do things right, you can retire rich
and then you can see the world. It’s much more enjoyable that way.”

Shortly after this conversation, Paul
had presented her with a course catalog for the local college, where she ended
up starting her prerequisite classes the very next semester.

“And I don’t want you doing
anything else while you’re taking your classes,” Paul had said. And then he
laid out his plan: “Now, because you already have your bachelor’s degree, in
something else, you could join an accelerated program and become a Registered
Nurse in a single year. But you are going to have to push it. You are going to
have to work extremely hard. I’ll support you. I’ll pay for everything. And
that means you don’t have to do any more writing.” He had looked proud, smug
even. “Then,” he had said, “We can work alongside one another. All day, at the
hospital. And when we are older, if you still have that travel bug, we could
go, together, to Honduras or Ghana or any of a number of other nations where
they need people like us, with the kinds of skills I have and the kinds of
skills that you will soon learn.” He was talking quickly now, “I could do some
humanitarian missions in war-torn nations around the world, and you could
assist with my surgeries, as I give people back their mobility. Their lives.”

“And I could write about it. I
could write a book about it. And take photos. I could document the whole
process.”

“Sure, if you had time for that.
I mean, you’d be pretty busy as my assistant,” he had said.

Paul was a good man, and he was
taking good care of her. She had to admit that it was nice not having to juggle
her career and school at the same time. It was nice that he took such interest
in how she spent her time, though, it occurred to her now, he did sometimes
worry about her skiing and running and biking alone; about her “heading into the
wild,” as he called it, all by herself. 

“I’m never really alone. I see
people on the trail all the time,” she reassured him.

“Yeah. Guys. Weirdos. Kooks who
know your favorite trails and where you’ll be every day.”

He had bought her some liquid
Mace once, to bring with her. “You can call it bear spray if you prefer,” he
had said.

“Okay, sure,” she said, and then
she put it in the drawer near her bedside table, where she figured it probably
was to this day.

Not that she hadn’t seen plenty
of kooks. One time, a man dressed in full camouflage followed her for awhile,
but she skied so fast he couldn’t keep up. Another man, whom she saw on
occasion, was in the newspaper for placing land mines and booby traps around
his home, just a quarter mile from this very trail. And then there were the
homeless people who lived in canvas tents or homemade tepees, even in these
harsh winter conditions. The locals called them “woodsies,” and they were in
the news from time to time, as well. Mostly, though, they kept to themselves,
working behind-the-scenes jobs in the resorts and restaurants: cleaning dishes
or sweeping gondola cars. It was a lifestyle she could understand on some level.
In some ways, she supposed, they were vagabonds.

With Paul, there would be no
vagabond lifestyle, and she reasoned now that this was just as well since she
was getting used to the life he provided for her. It was a good life, with
probably more than its share of luxury. But if she started a family, she would
be in that place she was never sure she wanted to be. Completely tied down.
Just like Yarrow. Neighbors would pop by to chat about things like potty-training
strategies  She would need to sew Halloween costumes and bake cookies for
fundraisers. The domestic commitments would go on and on. She’d probably have
to work as a nurse, too. And all of this would take her even further away from
her writing. But, then, she hadn’t gotten around to writing anyway. Not for
years. Not writing her own stories at least. As a ghostwriter, she was just
writing some other joker’s stories. For peanuts. So what difference would it
possibly make?

Maybe Paul would agree it would
be okay for her to take some time off from the career he had devised for her in
order to raise his children.
If
he decided he wanted them, of course.
That was a conversation she would still need to have. And then there was the
fact that learning about the human body made her feel kind of woozy most of the
time. If the professor showed a film in Anatomy, sometimes she couldn’t eat for
the rest of the day.

Just then, a sharp crack broke
the stillness of the forest. She sucked her breath in sharp and stopped. An
image flashed in her mind. A photo that had been in the paper after one of the
woodsies had bludgeoned another to death, just outside a handmade yurt. It was
some kind of fight over a fifth of Jim Beam. Olivine’s heart began to race as images
pulsed through her mind. Woodsies, but also mountain lions, black bears, and moose.
Why didn’t she bring that bear spray?

Something was definitely coming
her way. As it neared, the sound became more round, and it struck her, now,
almost like a yodel. A short yip, followed by a song, low and guttural. Louder
and louder. “Yodel ho del ho die ho.” Definite woodsy. Definite kook. Heading
straight for her. Olivine’s heart lurched into her throat.