Meanwhile, during all of this packing and moving, C. and I were juggling an increasing number of homes of our own. When we met, I was renting that little carriage house in the Hudson Valley and she was renting a place on the Eastern Shore. A few months later, she bought a house down there, after a comic conversation in which she assured me that she was neither unsubtly signaling a lack of interest in dating me nor indicating that she would never move away from Maryland. The house had belonged to family friends who, like my parents, had grown too old to take care of it; the opportunity was too good and the mortgage too affordable to turn it down. Around that same time, she began working on a book set largely in the Deep South, which meant that I was either going to be spending a lot of time in small-town Alabama or a lot of time alone. I opted for the former, and we rented a furnished double-wide on a lake an hour or so from the Georgia line. We named the taxidermy deer in the dining room Nickajack (for a breakaway region of the South that declined to side with the Confederacy during the Civil War) and read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil aloud to each other while making dinner and sat on the porch in the morning drinking coffee and watching the fog lift off the lake. While she went out to do her reporting, I stayed home and wrote and went for long runs in the steep piney hills surrounding the water; on days off, we got in the car and went in search of adventure.
The car was, in effect, another home in those days. We would drive from Alabama to Maryland (C., as I said, loves to drive), from Maryland to New York, from New York back down south again in an epic stretch of country music and coffee and twenty-four-hour biscuit joints. When we were not traveling toward one home or another we were traveling for work, hers or mine, or heading to this or that place we had always wanted to see, or making time to visit various far-flung friends. We tried to keep the car reasonably clean on those journeys, but its contents soon came to reflect the extent to which we really did live in it: hair ties, paper towels, a toothbrush and toothpaste, trail mix, sunscreen, allergy meds, a salt shaker (that was for C.), a blanket and pillow (I sometimes napped), water bottles, thermoses, a converter to charge our laptops (I once wrote an entire article between the Eastern Shore and Gaffney, South Carolina), books, magazines, swimsuits, rain jackets, a first aid kit, an annual pass to the national parks, and three full file boxes of C.’s reporting, which permanently occupied the same place in the trunk and served as a kind of security blanket, in case for some reason we were detained on a back road for two years and she needed to meet her book deadline.
From time to time, this lifestyle proved maddening. Inevitably, there were days when we realized that we had left my running shoes behind when we’d struck off for Alabama, or that the book we were looking for in New York was down in Maryland, or that an event we wanted to attend in one location was the day after we planned to leave for another. For the most part, though, it was incredibly fun—and something more than fun, too. C. and I were, I knew, extremely fortunate. Because we can both do our jobs from anywhere, we were never really in a long-distance relationship; we were in a relationship in which, together, we traveled long distances. And all those highways, all those miles, the hours of talking in the car, the country in its endless interestingness unfurling there beside us—all of this took us someplace else, too, farther and farther down all kinds of roads and ever closer to each other. And then, fifteen months into this lovely nomadic life, in what started out seeming like just another road trip, we drove back to Ohio because my father had been admitted to the hospital for atrial fibrillation.
In the nights before he died, C. and I slept on a fold-out sofa in the sitting room of the condo, a makeshift curtain drawn across its doorway. Or, anyway, we tried to sleep; for the most part I lay there awake, exhausted yet insomniac, unable to look either fully at or fully away from the coming loss. Each morning when I woke up, I had to orient myself all over again in the new home. My mother and father had lived there scarcely six months; now, with each passing day, it seemed less and less likely that he would ever return. When the time came to decide what to do, my mother, sad and calm and clear, told us that she wanted what she also did not want at all: to let my father go. I marveled at her strength then, and all throughout the time that he was dying, but grief will find a foothold anyway, and anywhere. The day after we moved him to hospice care, I came upon my mother in her bedroom, terribly undone. When I asked if something specific was upsetting her, she gestured toward the bathroom and told me, through her tears, that my father had barely gotten to use the handicap-accessible shower she’d had installed there for him.
Less than a week later, he was gone. After the arrangements were handled, after the memorial service was over, after C. had packed our bag and carried it out to the hall, I put my arms around my mother and could barely bring myself to let her go. I stood there in the doorway holding on to her, feeling stunned and drained and staring blankly over her shoulder into the living room. I remembered, then, what I’d thought the first time I’d seen the condo after she and my father had moved in: that it looked almost exactly like home, except that so much of it was no longer there.
It is, I must say, almost beyond belief what sometimes lurks around life’s next bend. C. bundled me into the car, nearly as unresponsive as if I were one of the boxes in the trunk, and drove me back to Maryland. It was past midnight when we got in. The mail was piled chest-high on a table in the living room. The cats twined ecstatically around our legs. I stumbled upstairs, overwhelmed by a colossal, grief-drenched fatigue, and began to get ready for bed. It was then that I glanced down and noticed tiny dots on my bare feet. I bent to look closer and thought a series of dim, desperate, incredulous things. Our cats do not go outside and we had never had a problem with them before. Yet by the time C. heard me call her and came upstairs, I could see that everything around me—the floors, the pillows, the blanket, my feet: all of it was covered in fleas.
We looked at each other for a very long moment. And while this is neither a practical nor a palatable suggestion, I do think, in retrospect, that if you ever want to know if you are in the right relationship, you might try the combination of an eight-hour drive, twelve forty-five in the morning, fresh grief, and fleas. C. took both my hands in hers, looked me in my shell-shocked eyes, and offered to get us a hotel room. I shook my head; the one thing I wanted, more than anything, more even than sleep, was to feel like I had a home. And so, as calmly as if it were high noon and she had just developed an interest in practical entomology, she began googling what to do about an infestation of fleas. Meanwhile I stood there uselessly, my sorrow suspended like something hideous in a murky solution of disbelief. The only other feeling I could access was an abiding gratitude that I had not walked into that house and that situation—that whole appalling, absurd, overwhelming situation—all alone.
Shortly thereafter, and for the first time in my life, I found myself almost equally grateful for the fact that there is such a thing in this world as a twenty-four-hour big-box store. It was inside one of these, halfway down the pet aisle, that my exhausted inward needle swung abruptly from meltdown to mirth. The next thing I felt was a longing that I knew would be with me for the rest of my days: I wanted to tell my father what had happened. My mother would feel awful for us, I knew, but my father— Standing there next to C., holding a bottle of flea shampoo, I started to laugh. My father, feigning perfect seriousness, would have said, “I’ve always told you you should get rid of those terrible cats.” He would have reminded me about the world’s shortest poem about fleas (“Adam / had ’em”) and understood its relevance: how even at the extremes of human experience, rejoicing or grieving, in paradise or newly expelled from it, we are still just another lowly creature at the mercy of the world. The thought buoyed me up somehow, and in the car on the way home I felt, despite everything, more human than I had in weeks. In another two hours, the floors were treated, the terrible cats were angry and clean, the old linens were in the laundry, fresh sheets were on the bed, and we were in it.