The only question I was prepared to answer, and the reason I had brought this incident up to begin with, was the question: “How have you been sleeping?” I had answered this question at my annual physical every year, always the same: “Not enough.” I was always tired, but Katherine and I both agreed it was lack of sleep. We both had the shared habit of staying up until one, two, three in the morning, reading or grading or fucking or researching or watching movies. We just liked the nighttime too much to sacrifice it to something as boring as sleep. And yet, we had to be up at seven-thirty every morning, share bleary-eyed cups of coffee and get in the car and drive to the university to make it on time for our respective 9:00 AM lectures. Thus, I was perennially exhausted, yawning during office hours, nodding off at my desk after lunch, only snapping awake because I felt my head fall.
But in recent weeks, I had been sleeping more than I ever had before – the sixteen-hour night was somewhat of an anomaly, but twelve- to thirteen-hour nights were commonplace, even regular – and yet, I was still tired. It didn’t seem to matter how much I slept; it was all just the same as before: the second I got out of bed, all I wanted to do was climb right back in. I had no idea how to make sense of this. Much like most of the other recent events of my life, it seemed to go against everything I’d ever known. I reported all of this to Dr. Hartman, except for the last part; it didn’t seem relevant.
“Tired all the time, eh?” he said. “You ever fall asleep where you’re not supposed to? Like behind the wheel?”
“No,” I said, which was true, because I didn’t drive anymore, because Katherine had taken the car.
He grunted and gently pushed his glasses up his nose. This single gesture made me instantly feel embarrassed – like I was being examined (which I was; it was a doctor’s appointment) and nothing had been found that was worth noting. Why had I said anything at all? It was such a banal complaint – surely every one of his patients reported feeling tired – I felt the need to differentiate myself and make this interaction worth his time. I combed through my memory for any detail that might be worth mentioning.
“Katherine used to say I snored,” I said.
“Ah,” he contributed. (Isn’t that funny, I thought, he usually asks other people to say ah, but here he is now, saying it himself. Ah.) “Well, that’s usually not indicative of a serious problem unless it’s particularly loud or irregular. Do you ever stop breathing during the night?”
“I think so,” I said, even though I knew so. The first night I slept in Katherine’s bed she stayed awake the whole night, she told me, just watching me breathe and not breathe. She was so afraid I would die. Imagine, I finally get a boyfriend, and he fucking dies in his sleep. What a joke. “Yeah, actually. Yes.”
This seemed to pique Dr. Hartman’s interest more than anything I had said so far. He felt moved to listen to my breathing, lifting up my shirt and pressing the stethoscope against my back. The metal was cold and harsh against my skin; it felt foreign and uncomfortable and yet strangely intimate. It felt like it had been years since anybody had touched me, even though it had only been thirty-eight days. I noticed goosebumps prickling on my arms in response to the contact.
“Your lungs sound totally clear,” Dr. Hartman said when he was finished, “but I think it’s best if we refer you to a pulmonologist anyway. I think you ought to get tested for sleep apnea. It sounds like you’re having poor quality sleep one way or another, so it wouldn’t hurt to get checked out.”
“Okay,” I said. Internally, I was fascinated by the concept of poor quality sleep. I had never considered sleep as something that could be “good” or “bad” in any meaningful way. As part of her very first linguistics class in undergrad, Katherine was taught about complementary and gradable antonyms; she had me quiz her on them. Gradable antonyms were pairs of words that existed on two sides of a spectrum with a large gray area in between, like “hot” and “cold.” It was possible to be “somewhat cold” or “very hot.” Complementary antonyms, however, were adjectives that could not take modifiers; the word either applied to you or it didn’t. Unique. Dead. Married. It wasn’t possible, Katherine explained to me, to be “a little bit married.” You either were or you weren’t. I realized, when I heard Dr. Hartman say the words poor quality sleep, that I had subconsciously filed the word asleep into the complementary category. Either you were sleeping or you were awake. The concept of “sleeping well” or “sleeping poorly” had never meant anything to me; it was only now that I was beginning to understand that these terms did mean something, and their meanings applied directly to my life.
Dr. Hartman told me he would write me a referral to the closest in-network pulmonologist, who would then call me to schedule an appointment. “In the meantime,” he said, “see if you can keep track of your sleep. How many hours, how many times you wake up in the night, things like that. Maybe ask Katherine in the mornings if she heard you stop breathing at all.”
There it was. Dr. Hartman had been my doctor for ten years, ever since we’d moved to Portland; he had never known me as anything other than married to Katherine, and clearly he still assumed it to be the case – why shouldn’t he? If Dr. Hartman believed us to still be married, but in reality we weren’t, did that qualify as being “a little bit married”? If a couple gets divorced and the husband’s primary care physician isn’t around to hear about it, does it really count? I swallowed and felt my lungs shakily fill with air and wished he would press the cold stethoscope to my back again, cold, silver, smooth.
“Um, actually,” I said, “Katherine and I aren’t together anymore. We divorced pretty recently.”
“Ah,” Dr. Hartman said again. A terrible pause while he scratched his mustache. “Ah, well. I see. I’m sorry to hear that, Seth.”
“It’s okay.”
A cough. “I, uh, I suppose you’ll want to update your emergency contact information, then,” he said. “You can talk to Christine at the front desk on your way out. She can give you a form to fill out.”
I did not ask Christine for the form. I just walked through the waiting room, straight past the ugly vinyl armchairs and the health food magazines and the fish tank in the corner, right out the front door. The sun had almost fully set and there was a biting chill in the air. I trod miserably to the bus stop and tried to picture the can of soup I would eat for dinner once I got home – heated up this time, eaten with a spoon out of a bowl. It would settle in my stomach and warm me up from the inside out, and I would feel okay – more than okay – good. Very good.
By the time the bus finally came, though, it had begun to snow, and I wasn’t thinking about soup anymore. All I felt was cold.
It reminded me of the snow from three or four Christmases ago – big, fat, fluffy snowflakes falling down to the ground heavy and fast, piling high on the ground. She and I were cuddling for warmth on our flannel sheets. My whole body was wrapped around her; I was enveloping her; her hands were in mine, small and cold, like little birds. It had only been a few days since she had been discharged from the hospital, and her wrists were still bandaged up. Earlier that day I had gently helped her clean the wounds and change the dressing. Her sharp inhale at the sting of the isopropyl alcohol. The sight of the gashes, line after line after line, methodically carved into each arm. It scared me, tore something open deep within me, like internal bleeding. I wanted to look away, but I didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” she had said, noticing the look on my face.
“Please never be sorry again,” I said back.
The first time she had tried to kill herself, we had only been twenty-one, about to graduate from Bowdoin. That time it had been pills. I rode in the back of the ambulance with her, watched her get her stomach pumped. We had already been married for more than a year. At the time, I thought that would be the end of it – she tried it, it didn’t work; now we would go on to live our lives differently, make things better. She would “get help,” uncovering the meaning behind those misty, ambiguous words. I could help. We would get older and build a beautiful home and she would look back on this moment and realize how young she was, how naive, what a mistake she had made, what a tragedy it would have been if she’d succeeded – how she would have missed out on things being better. I continued to believe this, for better or for worse, all the way up until her second attempt. Now, holding her bandaged wrists, watching the frigid landscape outside, I knew I could believe it no longer. An idea had gotten caught in my head, stuck there like the clasp of a necklace snagging on a loose thread: She doesn’t want to live for me. I’m not enough to make her want to stick around.
But how could that be – when she was right there, snuggled tight in my arms, warm and breathing and alive? I wanted to keep her there for the rest of our lives, right there where she would always be safe, where she would never leave me and would never want to. When I woke up the next morning, she wasn’t there. I could smell coffee and pancakes coming from the kitchen. And I thought, once again, that we could rebuild, and we could turn our life back into something very good.
On the bus ride home, I saw a live kitten poke its little head out of a woman’s very large handbag. The woman, elderly, with hair so white it was almost blue, looked down at the animal over the lenses of her spectacles and smiled at it. In response, it meowed. I was utterly transfixed by this interaction. I couldn’t remember if this was a normal sort of thing for people to do. Did people usually bring small animals on the bus? Were animals even allowed on the bus? I wasn’t familiar with the rules of the Greater Portland Metro bus – in fact, I hadn’t known Portland even had buses until I found myself without a car – so I couldn’t say for sure. It felt like I had suddenly forgotten every rule of social order, like I was completely disconnected from any concept of normality. The woman – the owner of the kitten – met my eyes and saw me staring, and now she was smiling at me. How was I supposed to react in this situation? If I smiled back, did that mean I endorsed her having a kitten in her handbag on the bus – and if so, was that an acceptable endorsement to make? Frozen in indecision, I decided to opt for a neutral expression of surprise. I widened my eyes and dropped my mouth open slightly, as if to say, Wow, you have a kitten in your handbag on the bus! with no further implication or commentary. This seemed to appease the woman, who chuckled and shook her head slightly, as if to say, I know, it’s something else, isn’t it? Don’t see this sort of thing every day, do you? I was pleased with my success. She got off at the next stop, handbag and kitten in tow, and I watched her slowly disappear as the bus pulled away.
This was one major benefit of no longer having access to a car. In the car it would have been only me, with only my thoughts to listen to, harsh and repetitive in unforgiving loops. She would have stayed if. You failed her because. There would have been nobody to talk to. (I hadn’t quite yet reached the point of talking to myself.) But on the bus, I was surrounded by people, and, by extension, I had to remember that I was a person too, despite everything. I needed to reorient myself and remember how to act like one. I wondered, too late, if maybe I should have actually said something to the old woman. No, I thought, that would be too much too soon; I would have to work up to something like that. Smiling was good enough for now.
When I walked through the front door of my apartment, my eyes fell – plummeted – on a hair tie on the floor next to the welcome mat. I bent down to pick it up and noticed one strand of sandy blonde hair still attached to it. To my horror, I felt my eyes begin to sting, and I immediately stood up and dropped it in the trash. Who would I be if I sat on the floor and cried over an elastic band and a piece of hair? I was determined not to let myself get any closer to becoming a full caricature of a divorced man. I was already eating cold soup, drinking heavily, sleeping “poorly.” But it was so hard not to get any worse when I felt like she wouldn’t leave me alone – like it wasn’t a clean break – because I kept finding traces of her everywhere, scattered around the apartment like artifacts waiting to be found on an anthropological dig. Empty prescription bottles (Lexapro 20 mg; Wellbutrin 200 mg), a cork from her favorite champagne, her old broken Discman, a topless Polaroid with a lipstick kiss. It made me angry and indignant sometimes, and totally in despair at others; if she was going to be gone, I wanted her fully gone, not partially gone. Shouldn’t something either just be gone or be there?
There was a can of clam chowder in the pantry that was set to expire in 2010. That meant I could eat it now, today, or at any point in the next two years. One more choice in the series of disjointed choices that was my life. I thought about the dust again, drifting and directionless, colliding only by chance. The choice I had made at the age of twenty had reverberated so far out into my life that I was still feeling the effects of it fifteen years later; that choice is what brought me here, to this kitchen in this apartment in East Bayside, standing over a can of clam chowder.
How could I have ever known that this was how things would have turned out? If I had known, would I have done any of it at all? What choices was I making right now that I would feel the impact of in 2010?
In the end, I heated up the chowder and ate it. It was only okay. I went to bed a little after eight o’clock.
A couple weeks later I had my appointment with the pulmonologist. Her name was Dr. Giordano. She was a very short, very tan Italian woman with a harsh bob. She was trying to talk to me, but I was so sick with fatigue that I wasn’t listening; I could hardly keep my eyes open. Every part of my body felt heavy. I had slept almost twelve hours the night before.
“Seth?” said Dr. Giordano gently. The gentleness hit me like a pang deep in my chest. “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I’m really tired. I mean, I guess that’s why I’m here.”
“Right,” she said, giving me a small smile. I could see my own haggard reflection in the lenses of her cat-eye glasses. I looked terrible. “I was just gonna ask you a few questions about the quality of your snoring. How would you describe it?”
More talk about quality. Did everything have a quality to it? “Um,” I said.
“I mean, have you been told it’s particularly loud?” she prompted me. “Or is it quiet? What’s the rhythm like?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I think it’s pretty loud.” At least twice a week, Katherine had had to kick me in my sleep, wake me up, tell me to roll over. You sound like a train. “And very irregular. Like, there’s no rhythm to it at all.”
“I see,” Dr. Giordano said. “That’s very characteristic of sleep apnea.”
“Oh. Really?” I swallowed. “How serious is that?”
She smiled again. “It’s very treatable,” she said. “Not to mention common.” I didn’t feel like this adequately answered my question.
She gave me something called an at-home sleep apnea test. It was a new thing they were giving patients to make sleep studies more convenient. “It’s very straightforward,” she told me. “If you have any trouble with it, give me a call.”
“When will I find out the results?”
“It’ll be a couple of weeks.”
“What if it doesn’t tell you anything?”
“Well, it’ll tell us something,” she said. “If it comes out to be inconclusive, our next step will be to have you stay overnight in the lab.”
I thanked her, secretly hoping that the results would be inconclusive after all. There was something strangely tempting about spending the night in the lab, hooked up to all sorts of machines, medical professionals monitoring me, watching for any irregularities, keeping me safe.
The sleep apnea test was a small cardboard box with all sorts of wires and sensors inside. I was supposed to peel the paper off the back of each sensor and stick them to various places on my chest. Skin-safe adhesive, the box said. The circular sensors reminded me of Dr. Hartman’s stethoscope. I also had to wear a heart monitor wrapped around my wrist, secured with Velcro. When I finished getting ready for bed that night and had all the devices attached to my body, I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. I looked like I had been abducted onto an alien spaceship and they were doing experiments on me. This seemed apt to me, considering the circumstances.
That night I dreamed about our wedding day again. In real life, it had been blisteringly hot, a dizzying late-August afternoon with air that smelled like burning grass and a deafening chorus of cicadas. We were sophomores in college. Since none of our friends had cars, we all walked together down to City Hall. There were no rings, no dresses or suits, and we were married by a notary who seemed very endeared, almost delighted, by our union. After the wedding, our friends bought us a bottom-shelf bottle of tequila as a gift, and we went to the local playground after dark and got horrifically drunk, tumbling down the slides, swinging so high that we fell off and threw up. I remember looking at her, looking at her disheveled dyed-black hair, her smudged eyeliner, her bra strap falling off her shoulder, and thinking to myself: That’s my wife. Going in and kissing her under the warm glow of the streetlamp, both of us stinking of alcohol and vomit, our friends hooting and hollering as they looked down at us from the children’s play structures.
Anyway, when I dreamed about it, things never happened that way. For one thing, I was always wearing a suit, and it was invariably an ugly one – a garishly golden bedazzled three-piece, a tacky powder-blue tuxedo, or something nondescript that was three sizes too big and paired with an offensive-looking tie. The wedding usually took place in a church. The dream would start when I walked through the chapel doors and saw Katherine standing at the end of the aisle wearing a gown so fluffy and white it might as well have been made of snow. Crisp, clean, glittering. She was bathed in light from all angles, like they were filming her for a commercial, so bright her features were obscured. The wedding guests, whom I couldn’t see, threw old mushy tomatoes at me as I walked down the aisle to greet her. By the time I met her at the altar, I was covered head to toe with red juice and seeds; I didn’t want to get too close, to touch her, lest I stain her perfect dress with tomato residue. But she would wrap her arms around my waist anyway and pull me in, squinting the all-encompassing light out of her eyes, and smile at me.
When I half-smiled back at her, all my teeth fell out. Every last one. I woke up tired.
She hadn’t just been my wife. She used to tell me there was no word for what we were to each other. “When I try to define it, I forget how to use language,” she said, “I just get reduced to sounds. Like basic phonemes. AAGGHH. UGGH.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Sounds an awful lot like moaning.”
“Well, yeah. I really only see you as a sex object.”
She also hadn’t just been depressed. When people heard about all that had happened to her, they seemed to think of her that way. They felt bad for me – me and my poor, frail, sad wife. We were closer to each other than anyone else, and we got to look at each other through every lens, under every light. Everybody else saw only what they wanted to see, only what was easiest for them to understand. But I saw every part of her, fractured and bright and colorful as a stained-glass window, light beaming through, illuminating everything around her.
She was one of the youngest professors in the linguistics department at Bowdoin. She had written her dissertation on Shelta, the secret language of the Mincéirí, or the Irish Travellers. The Travellers were a very small nomadic ethnocultural group who tried to conceal their speaking of Shelta from outsiders to protect themselves from discrimination. There were only a few thousand speakers of Shelta in all of Ireland, and she had dedicated years of her life to studying them as if they were the most important people in history. That was the kind of person she was. She left me once for three months – the longest we’d ever been apart as long as we’d known each other – to do field research in County Clare. “They won’t talk to you if they can tell you’re a stranger,” she told me once over the phone, on a rare international call that was costing us an arm and a leg per minute. “So if I want to do any research at all, I have to pretend to be one of them.” “Really,” I’d said, bemused. “How’s that working out so far?”
“Don’t sound so incredulous. I can be whoever I want to be.”
We found each other endlessly interesting. She specialized in phonetics and phonology, breaking down language into its smallest units: syllables and sounds. She spent hours poring over waveforms, charting the production and articulation of individual vowels. She could tell just by looking at a spectrogram what word was being spoken. She used to tell me she liked her field so much because she liked thinking about how things were put together. Cutting them open, taking them apart, seeing what’s inside. I was a professor of comparative literature, so I liked words, too, but I liked when there were a lot of them, rearranged in various orders. I liked enormous books filled with thousands of words that I could then put in conversation with other enormous books filled with thousands of more words. I had spent my life accumulating millions upon millions of words, which now floated around freely in my head like molecules in the air, like snowflakes in the wind. I sometimes tried to get her to read things with me, but she wasn’t interested. “I’m too busy trying to figure out how you people even got the tools to write those books to begin with,” she said.
She wanted to always break things down into smaller and smaller pieces, go in, in, infinitely inwards. I was constantly looking farther and farther out. I wanted to understand what everybody else understood. She wanted to go where nobody else had gone. There was always so much, then, to say to each other.
I didn’t just love her. I was dedicated to her. I knew she had an illness that made her not only sad, but mean. I forgave her when she froze me out for days, refusing to speak to me until I figured out what I’d done to make her angry. I forgave her when she’d take the keys and slam the door and leave for hours, making me stay up all night to wait for her. I forgave her every time she wouldn’t tell me she loved me. I forgave her for wanting to die. I understood none of it, and I loved her anyway. To me, that’s what absolute devotion was.
She was snarky and intelligent and hurtful and loving. She was happy and sad. She was my wife and my friend. I still reached over to her side of the bed at night, clawing at the empty space, trying to hold onto something that had long since slipped very far away.
To my delight, the results of the at-home test were inconclusive after all. Dr. Giordano called me to tell me that she’d scheduled my sleep study for the following Friday, and that I should bring everything I would need to spend the night there – pajamas, a toothbrush, what have you. I was ecstatic. Something to do – an activity – a distraction – a night away from our bed, which was now only my bed, contaminated by memory.
It made every day feel so much brighter. Before, I had only been going through the motions of my life because the only other alternative was to let everything come to a screeching halt. I dragged myself out of bed, got on the bus to work, lectured at my students about Middlemarch. But now I had something to look forward to – something novel and exciting. There might be something wrong with me, and the doctors were going to figure it out. They were going to pay very careful attention to me, pore over my data in painstaking detail, and diagnose me with something. I was taking care of myself; I was looking after my health – I wasn’t letting a silly divorce run me off course. Now I hummed lightly to myself while stirring sugar into my coffee, and I actually listened to my students’ comments about Middlemarch. Some of them were actually pretty insightful.
I left work early on Friday. I felt a leap in my chest as I locked my office door. I hoped, desperately, that one of my coworkers would see me and say “Hey, Seth. Headin’ out early? Going away for the weekend?” so I could say back: “No, actually, I’m getting a sleep study done.” The whole walk to the bus stop, I rehearsed this line in my head. I knew exactly which syllables I would stress, and when; I knew how I would curve my mouth into a sheepish little half-smile that said Yeah, I know, real exciting weekend, guess we’re getting old, huh? Nobody approached me, but that was okay. I grinned at the bus driver when he opened the doors. He looked a little perplexed, but smiled back – a success.
When I got to the sleep clinic, they took my vitals and listened to my breathing and asked me a few questions. I answered in great detail. Then it was time to get ready for bed: I took my sweet time brushing my teeth, washing my face, putting on a pair of flannel pajama pants and an old T-shirt that said “GEOLOGY ROCKS!” When it was nearly time to sleep, the nurse attached small metal discs to my forehead, my eyelids, my scalp, my arms and legs. They would monitor my eye movements, my brain waves, and any sort of movements I made during the night. They were stuck to my skin with a little bit of what looked like glue. “It’ll come off in the shower tomorrow,” she said apologetically, with no way of knowing how thrilled I was to be getting this glue stuck on me. She wrapped a belt around my chest and abdomen that would measure my breathing. An oxygen monitor was clipped to my finger. All of these things were connected to some sort of computer and would be tracked meticulously. The thought was staggering – that all these people who didn’t know me would be examining these numbers and figures that were invisible to me but constantly running in the background of my body. These undetectable motions, these sounds I could never hear myself – someone cared, someone was going to pay attention. It brought me a sense of comfort so intense I could have started to cry. I drifted off to sleep gently and easily.
Katherine asked me for a divorce almost immediately after her third suicide attempt. When she came home from the hospital, we stayed up the whole night together, holding each other on the sofa, crying sometimes, talking other times, mostly sitting quietly together. I’d said: “Can I ask you a question that might be insensitive?”
“Sure,” she said; “I think anything goes at this point.”
“Why don’t you want to live for me?”
I had finally voiced the stuck and nagging thought that hadn’t left me alone since the last time. She was quiet.
“I mean,” I continued; “I mean, Katherine, I love you so much. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anybody. I’ve never left your side, not once; I’ve never even wanted to, not even when things have gotten really hard. It’s just…why isn’t that enough, you know? Why am I not enough of a reason to stay alive?”
Then there was more quiet, for a very long time. We sat in it together, letting the weight of it settle over us like dust. Then she spoke. “Do you remember the first big fight we had after moving to Portland?” she asked. “When you said you felt like a bull in a china shop?”
I did remember. We had just moved into the apartment, all of our things buried in boxes, surrounded by packing peanuts. We were eating Domino’s using paper towels as plates. I’d made some stupid joke about her being lazy for not unpacking the dishes for us to eat off of, and she gave me this look – a look I’d seen a million times, eyes like a wounded animal, like a deer with a broken leg by the side of the road. She looked the way only a hurt person could look. I knew instantly that I had said something wrong. Typically I would apologize, but that night I was angry; all I wanted to do was joke around with my wife, and she couldn’t handle it. I felt overwhelmed, all of a sudden, by the responsibility of dealing with such a delicate person, the pressure of living with someone who might attempt suicide after one wrong move. And so I blurted out: Sometimes I feel like a bull in a china shop around you.
Pause. What do you mean?
Just, like, you’re constantly getting upset with me. I keep hurting you by accident. I always say the wrong thing, and I don’t know what to do. That’s what I mean. She repeated the phrase. A bull in a china shop, she said. A bull. In a china shop. And then, unbelievably, she laughed. Seth, that’s clever. I like the way you used that there. And suddenly we were okay again. We talked for an hour about idioms and their origins and finished the rest of the pizza. “Yeah,” I told her. “I remember.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m starting to think you were right.”
And it was only then that I realized what I had actually been saying back then, when I said that to her. I feel like a bull in a china shop around you. I told myself then that I was only being disparaging towards myself – that I was a big, dumb, ugly animal, clumsy and thoughtless, breaking things with reckless abandon. It was clear to me now what I had been saying about her – if I was the bull, that meant she was the china shop. Not just one fragile, breakable thing, but an entire structure full of breakable things, things that her entire purpose was to house and hold and carry with her. And there I was, within her, busting down her doors and breaking them. And none of it was anybody’s fault. It wasn’t my fault that I was the bull, nor hers that she was the china shop. We just were what we were. The phrase, then, seemed to indicate a fundamental incompatibility, a nature about us both that could never be changed, but could also never be worked around. Could only cause destruction.
“I’m starting to think you were right.” We loved each other, and it still didn’t work. We loved each other, but we were both feeling like shit, both of us, the breaker and the broken. We loved each other, but only in the way a bull can love a china shop. So she left, and it was over.
They woke me up at seven o’clock the next morning, when the sun was only just beginning to rise. It was the earliest I’d been awake on a Saturday morning in months, maybe years. I felt groggy and disappointed that the event I’d been looking forward to all week was over. Now I would have to find something else to make my life exciting and special. How did people manage to find things like that?
After I brushed my teeth and got dressed in the same rumpled clothes I’d worn yesterday, I walked through the front doors into the parking lot. It was ice cold, and the morning light was dim. Snow crunched under my feet. I became dimly aware of another pair of snow-crunchy footsteps behind me. Thinking that this would be a great opportunity to practice my social skills – I could say Good morning, perhaps even make a benign joke about how early it was – I turned around. And there she was. Sandy-blonde hair, pale skin, bags under her eyes looking darker than usual: my Katherine.
I felt a sickening rush of emotion rising up out of my stomach and into my throat, hot and acidic like bile. I swallowed it all down. She had stopped in her tracks, just as I had; we were both sort of gaping at each other. Neither of us spoke, but eventually one of us would have to. Who was going to break first?
She did. “Hi,” she said, her breath turning into smoke in the frosty air and curling up towards the sky. I hadn’t heard her voice in thirty-eight days: this voice that used to wake me up in the morning, put me to sleep at night, talk to me over the phone, whisper in my ear during sex. I struggled to process the fact that I was hearing it again, right now, in the frosty parking lot of a sleep clinic at seven thirty in the morning.
“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I have an appointment,” she said.
“What for?”
“I haven’t been able to sleep at all,” she said. “They’re gonna see if I’m an insomniac.” “Oh.”
“What are you here for?”
I smiled; I couldn’t help it. “I’ve been sleeping too much.”
She smiled back at me. “No kidding.”
“Yeah,” I said. Well, that, and I’m finally getting the snoring checked out.” “Oh. That’s good.”
We stood and stared in silence for a little while. In all the scenarios I’d played out in my head of what it would be like if this happened, I had imagined it would be incredibly uncomfortable. But this was okay. She had an old pair of mittens on, and she was shivering. Looking at her again, she definitely did look like she hadn’t been sleeping. “You look good,” I lied.
She snorted. “Seth, I look like shit.”
I laughed. “Yeah. I guess you do.”
“It’s fine. You do too.”
The sun was beginning to rise behind her, illuminating her in golden light. She was glowing like an angel. She was so bright I had to squint to look at her.
“Listen,” she said, “I’m glad I ran into you. I was going to call. I think I left a pair of pajamas at the apartment.”
“Oh.” (Was I saying “Oh” too much?)
“If you don’t mind waiting, my appointment shouldn’t be long,” she said. “I can give you a ride back home and I can just run upstairs and grab them?” She paused. “I mean, if that would be okay with you.”
Was it okay with me? Surely it had to be. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, sure.”
She smiled. “Thanks, Seth.”
“Of course.”
The forty-five minutes I spent in the waiting room were excruciating. It seemed unjust to me that Katherine had finally been back in my sight, and now she was gone again. I wondered anxiously if it had all just been a trick of the light, an optical illusion, and she would never reappear, because she had never been there at all – but then she came out. “They’re prescribing me Ambien,” she said with a shrug.
“Ah.”
“Another pill,” she joked. “As if I need more, right?”
“Maybe it’ll help.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
The car ride to my apartment was only fifteen minutes. I hated being back in the car. I had nearly finished convincing myself that the bus was better, and I was instantly proven wrong. How was it possible that the same distance could take fifteen minutes by car and more than double that by bus? The car was warm and cozy and had my favorite Weezer CD stuck in the stereo. I felt a sudden ugly rush of resentment that I didn’t have this car anymore, and then I let it pass.
I didn’t want to stare, so I only allowed myself to turn and glance at Katherine in the driver’s seat once every two minutes or so. She kept her eyes glued to the road, her hands gripping the steering wheel. She could be a very anxious driver at times. I had sometimes wondered why she was so nervous about getting into a car crash if she was suicidal anyway – it couldn’t have been death she was afraid of. It was only now that I realized that she was scared of killing me.
“Where have you been staying?” I asked.
“At my cousin Betsy’s house in North Deering,” she said.
“Oh, yeah, Betsy. She’s nice.”
“Yeah, but her husband’s a bum and her kid screams all day.” She laughed, and then paused. “I’m getting ready to move back to Boston, actually. I’m gonna live with my parents for a bit.”
“Oh,” I said. (Could I come up with nothing else to say?)
“I mean, they’re getting old anyway,” she said. “They might need help moving around and stuff. And I’m gonna see if I can get a job at BC.”
“Wow. BC.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I think I’m going to miss Maine, though. A lot.” She coughed. “I’m not ready to leave just yet.”
She pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. We sat for a minute in the sudden quiet that materialized when the engine stopped running. We got out and walked through my front door and up the stairs, and then suddenly we were back home, together. “It’s dusty in here, Seth,” she said.
“I know. I haven’t been cleaning much.”
She walked down the hallway into our bedroom. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to touch her chest of drawers; I assumed she’d emptied them out and taken everything she wanted. I told myself I would get rid of the chest itself at some point, but for now it was still there, casting its shadow over my life. She opened the bottom drawer and said “Aha! Knew it.” She held up an old cotton nightgown, pale blue with long sleeves. I used to make fun of her, tell her she looked like a grandmother whenever she wore it. It went all the way down to her ankles.
“Great,” I said absentmindedly. I was staring at the bed, dizzyingly tired; it was so early. I took my shoes off and lay down. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”
“No, don’t be,” she said. “I mean, I am too. I haven’t gotten a full night of sleep in weeks.” She was staring at the bed, too, at the side where she used to sleep. “Looks comfy,” she said.
“It is.”
There she stood, holding the car keys in one hand, the nightgown in the other. She got what she came for; she could leave whenever she wanted. But she wasn’t leaving. And I didn’t want her to.
“Maybe this is weird,” I said before I could stop myself, “I don’t know. But, I mean, you’re tired. Do you want to lie down for a little bit?”
Her eyes softened, the same way they did when we fought and I apologized for the fourth or fifth time. She looked the way she looked whenever she decided to forgive me. “It’s not weird,” she said. “I would like that.”
She took off her shoes. She unzipped her jeans and pulled them down to her ankles. She tugged her crewneck over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra; her nipples were hard from the cold. She slipped the nightgown on and let it drape over her body. She really did look like an old lady. But maybe we were just getting old.
She lifted up the covers and crawled into bed beside me. On instinct, I reached for her, and she let me. My heart was beating wildly; my chest was pressed against her back and I wondered if she could feel it. She took my hand in hers, and outside the window it began to snow.
