While You Were Gone: A Thought I Knew You Novella (12 page)

Chapter 11

Two Years Later

I
am rushing around the house, getting ready. Cal will be home in two hours, and I have those two hours to myself. On a Friday night, it’s like heaven.

Amy jabbers in my ear, something about the orchestra, the one I’ve left. I still hear the gossip through Cal. Nikolai is still Nikolai. Amy is still concertmistress. Cal is still Cal, easy-going and happy just to be
,
so different from anyone I’ve ever known. I sit and pull out my violin, the phone trapped between my shoulder and my ear, and work on tightening the bow. I pluck a low G, and it resonates in my hand.

“How’s teaching?” Amy asks, an abrupt shift of topic, and I can’t help wondering if it’s out of competitiveness. Her voice is soft and low, and I decide that it’s concern.

I sigh. “Harder and more rewarding than I ever thought possible.”

I teach music theory at the college and am a private music coach in my spare time. I have less spare time now than I ever have.

“I’m happy for you, Karen, really. You’re so much happier now.” She says this almost wistfully. I wonder if she wants this: my life with my little pseudo-family and upcoming wedding. I think back to how I used to be—lost, wandering, aimless—and feel a surge of gratitude.

The doorbell rings, and for one odd second, I assume it must be Cal, that he forgot his key. He stays here more often than not, but I know moving is in our future. I’ve never been particularly attached to this apartment, and truth be told, it seems to shrink by the day. I’m up and across the living room in a few steps. I open the door. On the other side stands a petite, dark-haired woman. She glances at me pensively and then around me, as if she’s trying to see who is inside.

“Hi, can I help you?” I ask her, covering the mouthpiece with my hand. I don’t see any brochures in her hand, so I can’t imagine she’s selling anything.

“I… do you have a minute? I’m Claire Barnes…” Her voice trails off, and she coughs. “You might not know me. Or maybe you do? I’m Greg’s wife.”

The bottom drops out of my stomach. I grip the phone in my hand, and my legs feel cold and numb. My head buzzes.

“I’m going to have to call you back,” I say to Amy, and without waiting for a reply, I hang up. “Greg’s wife?” I ask, hoping for one second, one quick, fleeting flash, that I’m wrong.

“Greg Barnes,” she says. “There’s been a car accident.”

Oh. Thank God. I have no idea who she’s talking about. A quick wave of euphoria fills my chest. I want to cry. “I’m sorry. The only Greg I know is Greg Randolf. Are you sure you have the right place?”

Her face goes white, and she sways on her feet. I think for a moment that she’s going to pass out. Then she does something entirely unexpected. She puts her hand to her forehead, and she laughs. “You’re going to want to let me in.”

I make coffee. She sits at my kitchen table, practically shrinking into the wooden chair. She hugs her bulky bag to her chest, and I try to study her without studying her. Her dark, almost black hair lies in kinks and curls down her back. Her face is pale, and her eyes are huge. She looks breakable, like a china doll. This is Greg’s wife? No wonder he couldn’t leave her.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” I say, just for something to say. “I travel for work.” A stretch of the truth—I sometimes accompany the orchestra to guest performances if my teaching schedule allows. I’m self-conscious of this woman, who probably has matching potholders and a full serving set for Thanksgiving. My apartment is still bare. I pour two mugs of coffee, mismatched. I hand her one with a picture of a disheveled cat that says
I don’t do mornings!
“You said there was an accident?”

“Two years ago, Greg was mugged and pushed into the path of an oncoming car. He was in a coma at St. Michael’s until six months ago. When he woke up, he didn’t remember anything, not his name, where he was from, nothing.” She speaks slowly, twirling her spoon around her coffee mug. It sounds as though she’s reading off of a script.

I cover my mouth with my hand, feeling sick. I take a deep breath and try to picture Greg, strong, tall, powerful Greg, hooked up to beeping machines and tubes with clear liquid, alone in a hospital bed mere miles away—for years—while I stayed here, moved on, dated Cal, mended things with Paula.
Oh, God, Paula will be back.
The back of my throat itches. “Is he okay?”

“Yes, sort of. He
will
be. Right now, his memory is spotty. He remembered your name, though. And mine and my children.”

Children.
Oh God, I’m going to throw up. I can feel it right in my throat, that watery, slippery back-of-the-mouth feeling.
Children.
What were you doing with me, Greg?

“Greg was married,” I say stupidly, stalling for time. My mind races through possible responses but settles on blankness. I literally can’t think. I need to get this woman out of my house. I need to think. Greg has been a shadowy remembrance in my mind for two years, and he needs to stay that way—a vague figure, the way I thought of Claire when I first found that ring. I need them both to go back to being cardboard people. Not real. “It makes sense. I could never call him. He was always traveling, he said.”

“How did you meet?”

I don’t answer her right away. I remember Greg the night that Scott broke up with me, the night I lost my audition. “Where else? In a bar. He was here for work. It had to be… oh, close to three years ago now?”
The very best version of you.

“You didn’t know about his accident, then? The nurses said it was in the paper.” She narrows her eyes at me, and I shift uncomfortably.

“The night he broke up with me was the last time I saw him,” I say, knowing he didn’t exactly break up with me. Well, not technically, but he didn’t choose me, either. Now I know why.
Children.
I want so badly to ask: how many kids? Boys? I can see Greg with all boys, a whole football team of boys.

“What night was that?” Her voice is sharp, like a cop trying to trap a criminal. My face heats up; I can feel it crawl up the back of my neck.

“I don’t know the date exactly. I guess it was late September…” I’m stalling, and she has those eyes trained on me, sharp as a tack. I don’t know what she’s looking for or expecting, but I know all her staring me down is making me nervous.

“September thirtieth?”

“Maybe? It was a Thursday night. I remember because I was leaving on Friday. I had a concert in New York. I cried the entire bus ride.”

“Tell me everything. Please?” She pushes her shoulders back, flush against the wooden chair.

I feel sorry for her. I shouldn’t feel angry, but I do. “I loved him. I thought he loved me. Or at least he said he did.” One time. One time he told me he loved me. My vision swims.

“Then why did you break up? That night?”

I can’t give her a good reason. Because I found out he was married? I already told her I didn’t know he was married.

I remember Paula asking about Greg, and I’d just told her he moved to China, latching onto the story he offered me before I realized it was probably just a set-up for a way out. Even back then—in his fading voice through the phone late at night—he was trying to figure out how to end it but was too much of a coward for the truth.

I sit up straight, pushing my back against the chair, my hands folded in my lap. “His company was transferring him to China. Some executive position, a big promotion. He thought it was a great opportunity.” I babble inanely. “I was a violinist in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. I was trying for concertmistress, the youngest in the history of the TSO. He wanted me to go with him, but there was no way I could go. We decided to put our relationship… on hold.”

She laughs and shakes her head. My story is thin enough to see through. She reaches over and touches my hand, her skin cool and soft. “Karen, there was no China. Greg was a bored, thirty-five-year-old man in a troubled marriage with a couple of kids in the suburbs of New Jersey.”

The picture she paints of him, the way she sees him, is so drastically different than my vision. He
did
love her. I realize that now. The way she tosses that off as if it means nothing infuriates me. It occurs to me then that I knew Greg better than his wife of ten years. I’ve never believed in soul mates. They always seemed the stuff of fairy tales, Sandra Bullock movies, and romance novels.

I close my eyes. “He said he didn’t have kids but that he’d wanted them.”

I hear her suck in a deep breath like I’ve stabbed her. When I open my eyes, her black eyes are peering at me with bald hatred. “Do you still love him?” Her voice is mocking, almost singsong. In that moment, I hate her too. My body feels like it’s vibrating with the hate.

I hold up my left hand, displaying Cal’s diamond, and shake my head. “I called his cell over and over until one day, after a month or so, the recording said the phone had been disconnected. It took about a year for me to move on. I knew he was American. He said he was originally from Syracuse, but it hadn’t mattered because he was never home. I stopped trying after that and met a very nice trombone player. The wedding’s in May.”

She smirks at me, her head cocked to the side, this woman in my kitchen, with her china-doll face and her big black eyes. I feel small. I want to tell her,
I didn’t know he was married.
Until, of course, I did. I need her to leave. I check the clock. Paula will be here any minute, and this woman cannot be here when Paula gets here. I can’t even think about it. Paula and Claire facing off with my whole life between them? Panic rises, and I swallow the bile in my throat.

I stand up, go to the drawer in the kitchen, and rummage around the back of it until I find it. The picture strip with Greg, the one from the mall. When we were happy. I shove it at her, angrily. I need her to take it and leave. It’s all I have left of Greg and me, not, of course, the only proof we ever existed at all, but the only thing available to me at that moment
.
I want to yell at her, “
get out, get out, get out.
” I’m standing, lording it over her, really, and I know it’s cruel, but I can’t help it. She needs to leave. Take the picture and leave.

She stares at it, dumbfounded, and says nothing for a long few moments. Then, softly, “He looks so happy.”

“Well, Greg was a goofball.” I almost laugh, thinking of all his jibing, our random question game, his singing in public, just walking down the street, singing. For a split second, I lose my focus, lost in the memory. She gives me the oddest look, almost as though she’s frightened of me. She touches her hand to her forehead.

“I have to go.” She stands up, leaves her coffee untouched on the table, and the picture strip flutters back to the tabletop. I rush her to the door. She turns, and giving one last look around the apartment, she says, “Good bye. It was nice meeting you.” She shakes her head with a little laugh. I shut the door behind her and breathe out, my heart hammering the inside of my ribcage like bat wings.

I hear Paula in the hallway. She has Wyatt with her. They must even pass by Claire as she’s leaving. I wonder if she looks at them, if she notices the little boy. If some maternal instinct pricks deep inside her, and she notices the brown of his eyes, the deep, cavernous brown that seemed to belong only to Greg.

I wonder if her children inherited
that, too.

I hear Wyatt’s excited voice talking over Paula, and I imagine his chubby hands flying. His words are gibberish still. He’s nearly two, but he talks a blue streak. More than you’d think.

I open the door and scoop him up and kiss his sandy-blond hair, floppy and curly and smelling like sunscreen and lollipop. His sturdy little arms circle my neck, and he laughs into my ear, a gurgly bubbling. I step back and stare at his face, those wide brown eyes, mirror images of his daddy’s.

I pull Paula inside and shut the door.

“What’s the problem?” she asks, loud and irritated, and I wave her silent. As far as she knows, Wyatt’s American daddy is living in China, and Wyatt is safe here, in Canada. Before he was born, I used to dream about Greg coming back. He loved me, he’d say. He missed me. Then, when I started seeing Cal, I’d wake up in the night, panicked and sweating at the thought that he’d come back and take it all away. Never did I imagine he was mere miles away, simply sleeping. My arms gooseflesh.

International parental rights are complicated. He could fight for custody.
Custody.
Take my
Wyatt, on select weekends and holidays, back to the States with him, to his wife, his kids. Tears pool in my eyes. He knows nothing about Wyatt. Nothing about how he hates loud noises or loves ambulances but only if they’re a block away. He doesn’t know that he hates spaghetti and any red sauce but loves white pizza and eats spinach, but only on toast. He doesn’t know that two of Wyatt’s toes on each foot are webbed—are Greg’s toes webbed?—or that his thumbs are slightly different shapes. Greg doesn’t know how he likes to curl my hair around his index finger when he’s tired. Sometimes, he talks in his sleep, his hand touching his own mouth, and I think about genetics and how it’s amazing. I try not to panic about all the things I don’t know, heart disease and genetic disorders and cancer history.